Book Review: Selenium WebDriver Practical Guide

Are you trying to switch in to Selenium WebDriver automation and your boss  is insisting to automate all web application over which you working since long time then I think Selenium WebDriver Practical Guide by  Satya Avasarala  is going to help you in the best way. This book has incorporated everything that is going to help both Beginners along with experienced automation testers and it is easy to follow because this book has featured step by step tutorial approach and this step to step approach is going to help every reader to digest every chunk of content written in this book. So any one can start his learning with this book.

What is inside this book




The books starts with a detail history of Selenium, and has also included “how each flavor of selenium component like IDE, Selenium 1.0 and WebDriver are different from each other” and what has made Selenium Webdriver to win the race of all the previous components. This chapter also includes project setup and along with interaction with browser and commonly used actions on generic web-elements present on any web-page.

Next Chapter has covered interaction of WebDriver with Keyboard and mouse and has also included examples to show how it works

Chapter 3 is the one which is dealing the most asked question on internet . How to handle alert, frame and pop-up and how I can take screenshot of any page during script execution. Lastly in Chapter 3 implicit wait and explicit wait has been mentioned means after reading this you would learn the lesson to prevent your script breaking from Stale Elements on page or Element not visible kind of exceptions.




Chapter 4 is going to help you how to run your IE Browser, Chrome browser and all other browser by setting the property of its executable binaries

Chapter 5 is the my favorite because this chapter is going to help  you to understand how to deal with the event-handling aspect of  WebDriver. You can read this chapter on this link. This is the chapter that has been written for experienced WebDriver user .So this chapter will intend experience WebDriver user to purchase this book.

Chapter 6 is for the people who are not quite familiar with the file handling in java and want to read it in detail and its proper use in WebDriver. So this chapter is also going to help beginners to learn some raw java concept that is going to help them in their scripting with WebDriver.

Chapter 7 and 8 is one of the most talked topic in Selenium Script. These two chapter include detailed description of RemoteWebDriver and WebDriverBackedSelenium  and has also included the concept of Selenium Grid concept .

Chapter 9 has included the concept of Page Object model and how to use it when developing your tests using java language. Author has made an effort to explain this topic with real time examples so might be you would find a way to understand the concept of Object Model in WebDriver. But still need some tweaking in page object model description.

Chapter 10  is going to help you out to understand the concept of mobile automation using appium and I am pretty sure that people who are seeking help related mobile automation is going to be benefited with this part of the book a lot.

Conclusion

Overall this book is meant to both beginner and experienced WebDriver user. But this books is missing the most important part i.e Junit/Testng framwork and without junit and testng reading Webdriver is like eating food without taste and somewhere you would feel like language of this book is becoming awkward.
But if you have bought this book then don’t forget to read Chapter 5 and 6.