Today there is no shortage of books and courses with which to learn the Java programming lan­guage. And there are also books and courses with which to learn how to do test-driven development (TDD) in Java.

But there seem to be no books or courses that teach Java with TDD from the very beginning. The common wisdom seems to be that the students must learn the fun­da­men­tals of Java programming before they can even be told about ap­ply­ing TDD to Java programming.

Before the students can even think about writing a test, they have to know all the Java primitive data types, how to write For loops, single-line com­ments, multi-line comments, etc. They also have to know the code name of the original Java pro­to­type, and lots of other Java history "trivia."

Or do they? Clearly there are some things students must know about Java before they can under­stand what a JUnit test is. But maybe there are certain things that are normally con­sid­ered very basic, like the characteristics of every prim­i­tive data type, that can be put off to until after the stu­dent has learned the basics of TDD.

In this book, I'm trying to figure out what is the minimum amount of information about the basics of Java syntax and the principles of object-ori­ent­ed programming that stu­dents need to know before they can start learning the basics of testing Java programs with JUnit.

The principles of TDD easily carry over to other testing frameworks, like TestNG and the testing framework the author has created.