Book Review: Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk.   After all of the other literature I read on refactoring and domain driven design, this book is pretty useless.  To me, there were three points to this book: 
  1. A rationalization for continuous integration mixed with a definition of what continusous itegration is. 
  2. A Howto for installing and properly using Cruise Control and it's miscellanious tooling.
  3. A rationalization for test driven development.
As for the first point, I think that the author used way more words than necessary - the material could have been handled as a lengthy blog post.  As for the second point, Cruise Control isn't the only build server tool out there (i.e. Hudson) and I really shouldn't be the target demographic having already used both of these tools and having created Big Visible Cruise Web.  As for the third point, the case has been made in other books, and making it here was just a waste of time and space.  Perhaps because this book pre-dates better books on TDD and DDD, this was necessary, but in today's world, this information could really be stripped.

I recommend this book for readers new to DDD and TDD, and for skimming by readers who are familiar with modern Software Engineering practices.

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