I am almost two-thirds of the way through GOOS and I am finding that, with yet another technical book, I am having a difficult time following what is going on. This book is a walk through of a test driven approach to writing an application using Java, JUnit, and JMock.

This is not an unfamiliar feeling during my apprenticeship. My first couple of assigned reading materials were Bob Martin’s Clean Code and Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns and Practices, neither of which are light, coffee table readers.

I was really looking forward to reading Addison and Wesley’s Growing Object Oriented Software, Guided by Tests. I had been suggesting to my mentors that I was not really comfortable with a test driven approach to programming, and I think this was them also trying to feed me more resources. It is definitely something that I think I could benefit from during or after my apprenticeship.

As with Clean Code and PPP, I was aware that examples in GOOS would be in Java. Having read through most of it I can share that, even after going through Martin’s two books, I still found it difficult to follow. Unfamiliar Java syntax had a role to play, however, I think it’s mostly because I tried to read the text while mostly skimming over the code segments, just accepting that I was not going to understand what was going on. I figured that if I tried to read the code for comprehension, it would send me down a lot of contextual rabbit holes and that it would be difficult to get back on the path.

To a certain extent, I was correct in that assumption. I could dive so deeply into some of the things I was reading about. I guess that is sort of the point of this blog. But I found that after the first dozen chapters or so, no new language constructs were being presented. I was just seeing the same unfamiliar java that was presented in the first few chapters, except now I did not have a base for which to build upon for the more complex refactoring.

I’ve gone through half of the book with no real sense of accomplishment. I have decided to take a step back. I understand the reading and blogging requirement from my mentors, however I don’t think I am getting out of it what they think I am getting out of it. At this point, I am picking smaller details from the text just to learn about Java. I am not learning about TDD but instead building my knowledge of the language.