New Load Testing Book
I already wrote about Performance Testing Books and Bayo Erinle’s first JMeter book, Performance Testing With JMeter 2.9.
Now a new Bayo Erinle’s book, JMeter Cookbook, was published by Packt Publishing with the subtitle: 70 insightful and practical recipes to help you successfully use Apache JMeter.
Book has 8 chapters and appendix, total 211 pages, as following:
Chapter 1: JMeter Fundamentals
Chapter 2: Handling Responses
Chapter 3: Building Robust Test Plans with Controllers
Chapter 4: Testing Services
Chapter 5: Diving into Distributed Testing
Chapter 6: Extending JMeter
Chapter 7: Building, Debugging, and Analyzing the Results of Test Plans
Chapter 8: Beyond the Basics
Appendix: Installing the Supporting Software Needed for This Book
Every chapter includes a number of different recipes. For example, chapter 8, Beyond the Basics, includes Continuous Integration with JMeter, testing with different bandwidths, using the HTTP Cache Manager component, using script languages within test plans, writing Test scripts through Ruby DSL, understanding JMeter properties, monitoring servers while executing tests (using VisualVM, YourKit Profiler, and New Relic), and performance tips to scale JMeter.
The main strength of the book is that the author provides very specific recipes, listing applications, tools, and steps in detail. If you follow it, you will learn a lot about overall infrastructure used in web software development and operations (for example, Vagrant, VirtualBox, Maven, Git, AWS). Not only base JMeter is discussed, but also other elements of JMeter ecosphere get mentioned – plugins and related services (such as Blazemeter and flood.io).
It is also probably the main weakness of the book. It is somewhat light on the conceptual side, some recipes includes a lot of specific infrastructural details that are not necessarily a part of the solution. Readers may have a similar task, but very different infrastructure – so will need to map the recipe to their own environment, figuring out themselves what are important parts of the recipe and what are technical details provided just to make the example working. Although it is probably what we should expect from the book named ‘JMeter Cookbook’.
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I believe that the book would be helpful for every person involved in performance testing with JMeter. Probably it shouldn’t be the first book to start and probably it shouldn’t be the only book – it is good to complement it with books discussing performance testing concepts. But it is definitely an important addition to any performance-testing-related library as actually it is the first good book of this genre.
As strange as it sounds, Bayo Erinle’s books (first Performance Testing With JMeter 2.9 and now JMeter Cookbook) are the first decent books about a specific decent load testing tool. For [at least] 20+ years of load testing history there was no good books published about a specific mature load testing tool. None. Well, at least none worth mentioning. There were several good generic books – but there are things in performance testing that you can’t explain generically, you need specific examples. And now we have already two good JMeter books by Bayo Erinle.
