William Cameron | Beyond the Keyboard

When beginning Unit testing it is hard to find a good starting point. There is a lot of theory and some very good points of reference, but what about actually getting down and dirty & hands-on as so many of us love to do? Here are some ideas, and pointers on how you might want to think about starting out with TDD and Unit testing an existing system. I am a PHP Developer, primarily working on an Apache/MySQL stack, however I would assume these principles can be carried over to any project, if you substitute the appropriate technologies. I will assume you have been through a few basic tutorials on PHPUnit or are at least familiar with a Unit Testing framework of some description. I won't go into a step by step set up but might assume you know a few things. 1. I would begin by getting a local development copy set up and running. Using XAMPP and MySQL, get a copy of your web application running off of localhost, even if it only has a few test rows of data and is stripped down

No one knows if it was a man, or a woman, or a child that first did it, but we do know that about 40,000 years ago, someone put a faint red dot on the wall of a cave in Spain. Humankind has always felt a burning desire to record information and transmit it into the future. What that dot meant, no one really knows. Perhaps it was the first expression of binary? Perhaps it was just a dot. 7,000 years later, and our ancestors were expressing themselves in the form of horses, panthers, cave bears, mammoths, and much more inside different caves, this time in the south of France. It’s the first example of recorded history, the first transmission into the future. It took many thousands more years until we discovered writing. The Sumerians started scraping sigils into clay tablets and baking them — an act which preserved them almost forever, and because of it we, know so much about their society and the way it worked. Now, of course, we have the Web, and the world has been transformed. So

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