Chapter 1, Performance Testing Fundamentals, covers the fundamentals of performance testing and the installation and configuration of JMeter.

Chapter 2, Recording Your First Test, dives into recording your first JMeter test script and covers the anatomy of a JMeter test script.

Chapter 3, Submitting Forms, covers form submission in detail. It includes handling various HTML form elements (checkboxes, radio, file uploads and downloads, and so on), JSON data, and XML.

Chapter 4, Managing Sessions, explains session management, including cookies and URL rewriting.

Chapter 5, Resource Monitoring, dives into the active monitoring of system resources while executing tests. You get to start up a server and extend JMeter via plugins.

Chapter 6, Distributed Testing, takes an in-depth look at leveraging the cloud for performance testing. We dive into tools such as Vagrant and AWS, and explore the existing cloud testing platforms, BlazeMeter and Flood.io.

Chapter 7, Helpful Tips, provides you with helpful techniques and tips for getting the most out of JMeter.

To successfully execute the code samples provided in this book, you need the following:

This book contains pointers and additional helpful links in setting all these up.

The book is targeted primarily at developers and testers. Developers who have always been intrigued by performance testing and have wanted to dive in on the action will find it extremely useful and gain insightful skills as they walk through the practical examples in this book.

Testers will also benefit from this book since it will guide them through solving practical, real-world challenges when testing modern web applications, giving them ample knowledge to aid them in becoming better testers. Additionally, they will be exposed to certain helpful testing tools that will come in handy at some point in their testing careers.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Should you need to customize JMeter default values, you can do so by editing the jmeter.properties file in the JMETER_HOME/bin folder, or making a copy of that file, renaming it to something different (for example, my-jmeter.properties), and specifying that as a command-line option when starting JMeter."

A block of code is set as follows:

name=firstName0lastName0
name_g=2
name_g0="firstName":"Larry","jobs":[{"id":1,"description":"Doctor"}],"lastName":"Ellison"
name_g1=Larry
name_g2=Ellison
server=jmeterbook.aws.af.cm

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

name=firstName0lastName0
name_g=2
name_g0="firstName":"Larry","jobs":[{"id":1,"description":"Doctor"}],"lastName":"Ellison"
name_g1=Larry
name_g2=Ellison
server=jmeterbook.aws.af.cm

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

vagrant ssh n1
cd /opt/apache-jmeter-2.12/bin
./jmeter --version

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Launch JMeter."

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