Bart Thompson has written up a concise review of Java Testing and Design, by Frank Cohen. The book teaches you how to build production-worthy, scalable, and well performing Web-enabled applications. It presents techniques and tools to enable developers, QA technicians, and IT managers to work together to achieve productivity in development and test automation.

From the Introduction

This book is an excellent guide to testing Web applications and Web services. I expect it will benefit all readers, from software developers or QA techs just getting started, through to the experienced coders and testers. The book took me past the basic stuff you learn in books on Java development and gives you the practical experience, tips and knowledge I needed to deliver software that scales and is reliable.

Read Bart Thompson's Review of Java Testing and Design

This book has disappointed me on several grounds.

The Name
The first disappointed was the book's title. The first word of the title is "Java," but the author avoids showing any Java code. The closest he gets to Java is Jython, a scripting language implemented in Java. If you are designing or testing performant Java applications, you will be better off reading Enterprise Java Performance by Steve L. Halter and Steven J. Munroe, also from Prentice Hall. If I were to name this book, I'd call it "Testing Webservices with TestMaker & Jython."

Topic Organization
This book is a collection of very wordy, unclear, and unrelated notes. The diary-like organization of topics, left me wondering, "where is the meat." Repetition of subject matter, unfocused discussion and abrupt transition of topics is bound to make you lose your attention. Examples don't build upon one another. If you are very dedicated and focused, you are left with tons of irrelevant text to skim through to derive any real value. Some ancillary topics could have been better located in an appendix. A list of acronyms or glossary of terms would be nice.
You will notice frequent typo/errors in this book.

Vague Notions
While building the context to promote TestMaker and "intelligent agent" as the be all and end all of Software Engineering (Part I, about 200 pages), the book cared less to define the term itself. TestMaker is a free, open-source tool for unit testing, load testing, and system monitoring developed by the book's author.

Target Audience
Contrary to a few comments about this book, this book provides little value to Java developers. However, Web Rubrics (an objective performance grading matrix), User Archetype (a Prototypical User, modeling user behavior and habit. Is an extension of UML Actor), WAPS (Web-enabled Application Points System - A matrix to measure software quality based on functionality, performance and scalability) and The Micromax Lifecycle (many small improvement to software application and techniques to categorize and prioritize micro-tasks) might be of interest to "QA technicians" and "IT Managers."

Reference/Textbook
I normally look for two qualities to assess a book. First, does the book cover a generic ground in sufficient depth to serve as a reference? Poor organization and shallow coverage of concepts doesn't put this book on my reference bookshelf. Secondly, I look for hands-on examples that can serve as a tutorial for the reader. This book doesn't provide a single line of Java code.

To summarize, I do not recommend this book for Java developers interested in learning more about Java testing and design.

Is this what passes for a book review these days? A few generic paragraphs and a list of the table of contents (with misspellings, yet!). It almost reads like a press release...sentences like this:

"He also uncovers a huge scalability problem with Web Services that every Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) developer should know about."

Should not be found in a review. What is the problem? How did he find it? Is it true?

The followup message by Anshuman was much more useful.