2013-09-28

Book Review- Performance Testing With JMeter 2.9



In this article I am going to talk about a book on Jmeter recently published from Packt Publisher. I was lucky to get an offer to review this book as a technical reviewer before publishing (you may find in the book). Today I am going to talk little more about the book. 

Most of we know , jmeter have its own documentation and which is pretty enough and rich.

So, why we need book. Why we want to invest. Practically, jmeter documentation is bit too much technical from the beginning. For a new person, it is a little bit complex. At least I felt that when I have started.  Frankly, I have struggled a lot while going through very details. And we can learn only core jmeter form its documentation. 
 But, the is very useful in this case. It is very careful regarding its presentation. It is organized in such way to so that it can be very helpful for beginners. We can start testing very quickly without knowing much inner details.  And, it creates an impression of being very easy to new learners. Besides that, this is the only book that contains Jmeter plug-in explanations. Jmeter plug-in was created to overcome the advantages of Load Runner over jmeter. No book contains this much detail and useful information about jmeter plug-in. This is the cover page of the book

 

So, Who are the readers? The book is useful if you are
1. A new person to performance testing with jmeter
2. You are using jmeter for certain time and you want to use advance features
3. You are doing R&D on tools, and you want to know detail about what Jmeter can do
4. You are a java expert and you want to make a tool like as jmeter, you can gather information as well as get the code and requirements.

Advantages of this book :
1. Most of the testing comes with examples and detail description. So, it gives clear idea and useful information before start practicing and implementing.
2. Very good explanations on side technology that are used( i.e. - Regular Expression , JSON etc)
3. Very useful explanation on advance topics like session, cookie, URL rewrite.
4. Spatial chapter on server monitoring (profMon) and distributed testing which are very helpful & necessary for industry standard testing.
5. The packaging of the books is very good. I got a hard copy of the book.

Some Disadvantages:
1. I admit, the book could have more image to explain. I guess, author want to keep book more thin and cheap.
2. The book could add some more detail chapters on how to get useful reports. As we know, jmeter used to provide raw results (unlike load runner), we have to process the results in to report manually. Some example with ideas regarding reporting would have been very useful.
3. The books still looks a bit technical not from be beginning but in later on. So, if we run through chapter without practicing, it might be little complex.

My opinion: The book is perfect for a new person as well as for regular jmeter users. It would be very useful if there were some explanation about extending jmeter  codes to make new custom tools as well as how to customize jmeter and plugins on project and scenario basis. 
And, I think this book is worth buying for both learning and industry level performance testing. You can buy this book from amazon

Thanks...:)