Prerequisites

We will be using Python 3.4 in this book. Most of the techniques will work on Python 2.6+ as well, but some small changes may be required to the examples presented in this book in order to make them run. The Appendix B, Working with Older Python Versions lists these changes.

This book assumes that the reader has an intermediate level of Python understanding. In this book, we will be using Python language features such as lambdas, decorators, generators, and properties, and we assume that the reader is familiar with them. While we will give a brief description of these features as we encounter them, this book will not go into a lot of details about how they work, choosing instead to focus on how to test such code.

Since TDD is a hands-on coding activity, this book will use a lot of code snippets throughout. We recommend that you follow along by typing the code and running it yourself. It is much easier to understand the code and concepts when you can see it working (or not working) in front of you, rather than just reading through the code in this book.