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Books Written By Alan Richardson

Java For Testers Dear Evil Tester Book Cover Automating and Testing a REST API Cover Hacking JavaScript free ebook Selenium Simplified Cover Migrating Selenium 1 to Selenium 2 Cover An Interactive COBOL Interpreter and JSP Debugger Cover

This page contains details of the books written and published by Alan Richardson to help improve the technical programming skills of testers.

Free eBooks

Java For Testers

People ask me what books I recommend to learn Java. And I have a few books that I thoroughly recommend, but they are not aimed at beginners.

Those that are aimed at beginners, I re-read recently and came to the conclusion that they would confuse more than help, and they don’t help people become productive fast.

I wrote a book that gets testers started fast, is easy to follow, and has examples related to their work.

Learn more about the book "Java For Testers"

Dear Evil Tester

What testing book would you recommend to people who want to learn what it takes to ‘be’ a tester?.

Do you have the advice you need to advance your test approach?

“Dear Evil Tester” contains answers to questions that you didn’t know testers asked.

Learn more about the book "Dear Evil Tester"

Automating and Testing a REST API

A Case study of Testing and Automating the Open Source Tracks REST API using: Java, RestAssured, Postman, cURL and HTTP Proxies

This new book is a well rounded and detailed look at the thought processes and techniques for testing a REST API based application.

Learn more about the book "Automating and Testing a REST API"


Selenium Simplified

The Selenium Simplified - Java, Selenium-RC, book. “Selenium Simplified” 1st and 2nd editions are now free.

The 2nd edition of “Selenium Simplified”, a tutorial guide to Selenium RC in Java has been published. It is a tutorial based book, so it has plenty of screenshots and walks you through the learning process.

The book contains 417 pages split into 38 chapters, jam packed full of Selenium tutorial goodness. It is bursting at the seams with a desire to get the reader quickly and easily doing test automation in Java with Selenium.

More about the book and free download links


Migrating Selenium 1 to Selenium 2

This book was written in 2011 and updated in 2014 to support migration from Selenium 1 to Selenium 2.

This book was the text for a workshop I conducted on Migrating from Selenium 1 to Selenium 2.

Download as a free pdf


An Interactive COBOL Interpreter and JSP Debugger

A JSP diagrammer and Cobol interpreter for the Atari ST. This was my University Honours project over 20 years ago.

It was a crude JSP diagrammer with a built in COBOL interpreter - because they were future in the late 80s and early 90s.

I have uploaded the scanned versions of the thesis, the follow on paper and the interim report.

I split the thesis in to sections (see the thesis folder).

Download as a free pdf

Hacking JavaScript ebook

I learned JavaScript in small chunks, by Hacking JavaScript applications i.e. small changes that made the more fun to play, or writing small scripts in the console to create test data, or even writing simple bots that would play the game.

Learning this way means we don’t need to install and IDEs, we don’t have to install and SDK. Everything we need to start learning and using JavaScript is already installed in our browser.

This free 65+ page book contains some tutorials, exercises and plenty of links to other resources to help you learn. And this is the way I learned, so I’m confident you will gain value from this free material.

Download Free Ebook