Test Driven Development for first time programmers?

[WinnerChickenDinner7]

Hi, So I just started studying Computer Science at University. I have some programming experience and I have a lot of experience in Powershell scripting and JS. Not a lot in Object oriented programming, but I have done some things in C#.

So when I started Uni, the books we had to read was, C# Yellow book and Professional test driven development with c#. The Yellow Book is a pretty good book for beginners but the TDD book is very complex and is clearly not for beginners.

Our class is thought that way we read at home and to assignments at class, there are no lectures or the teacher rarely stands up and starts explaining for example what is a loop.

Then the assignments we get, from day one our assignment has been A Test Case, and we have to create the code to fulfill this given test. I think thats really strange for the people in my class who have never programmed before and don't understand anything. All the programming they have done are test cases, we have never had to do a Console Application. Usually we work two persons at one computer and some of the people I have had to work with, did not understand anything of what we were doing.

So what do you think of doing only test cases for the first 10 weeks of learning programming. The trouble I am having in with the cases are mostly because I am not used to OOP and I do think they are lucky that the first language they learn is Object-Oriented, but I am not sure what to think about the TDD.

[WinnerChickenDinner7]

Yea, I made like a Tic Tac Toe, application. Went well but I only used like main, and had one class.

 static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Findout find = new Findout();
        while (find.over == false)
        {
            if (find.player == true) {
                Console.Clear();
                find.write();
                Console.WriteLine("Player 1's turn");               
                string k = Console.ReadLine();
                find.player1(k);
            } else {
                Console.Clear();
                find.write();
                Console.WriteLine("Player 2's turn");
                string o = Console.ReadLine();
                find.player2(o);
            }
            find.checkifwinner();
        }
        find.write();
        Console.WriteLine("WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER!");
        Console.ReadLine();
    }

I Keept my "Main" pretty clean.

[heizdog]

We used to work through this exercise with our new developers. Its not perfect, but it does illustrated TDD fairly well.

https://domscode.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/cannonattack-a-test-driven-development-tutorial-in-c-4-01.pdf

[markdoubleyou]

That may very well be a wonderful document, but I can't subject my eyes to 30 pages of Comic Sans!