Mastering Selenium WebDriver 3.0: Boost the performance and reliability of your automated checks by mastering Selenium WebDriver, 2nd Edition

This is, unfortunately, a terrible book. Just in the first two chapters alone, you will find inconsistent code examples (some are clearly bits from the first edition, as you can tell by certain incorrect method signatures), code that doesn't match up with what's being described in the text, and code printed in the book that doesn't match the code in the GitHub repository provided.I submitted errata for the first edition of this book and while there have been some improvements (for example the JUnit inclusion), there are still a series of errors that were not rectified and the introduction of entire new ones.If you're already fairly proficient with Selenium in a Java context, you will likely be able to work your way around these problems. And if you do, you will find that the author does actually create a fairly concise and useful framework that allows you to explore Selenium within Java. This includes up-to-date material such as Chrome and Firefox headless and the use of the new Options approach that Selenium uses, which merges in DesiredCapabilities to a set of options.So there is good to be had here, in terms of some of the material. The problem is that the errors are glaring to the point of ridiculousness, especially in a second edition. You will encounter many such errors just in the first two chapters alone. All of these are certainly surmountable but for someone who is learning, this book will likely rapidly become tedious to the point of distraction.What's most aggravating is that I was able to find these problems on my first read-through of the book. I literally wrote this review after going through the first four chapters. If I could find these errors that quickly, why couldn't whomever reviewed the book? (Assuming, of course, that someone did.) This is an extremely disappointing second attempt by this author and I would highly recommend people avoid this. If you want to get the basics of what the author was providing, simply look up the repo within Packt's space on GitHub. You might not save yourself any aggravation but you will certainly save yourself some money.

Clearly written by somebody who has done significant work with Selenium and to a lesser extent Appium, this is a book that contains more useful information and code than any other Selenium book that I had read so far (and I’ve read quite a few).The writing is opinionated, which works well given the experience of the author, but with one exception – unnecessary references to China. I would have expected any decent editor to have had that section removed.For the most part, I agree with the technical advice given, although not quite 100% of the time. There are also some topics missed that I would have included, but those topics are also missed in pretty much every Selenium book. With that caveat, the list of topics covered is still very good. Whether it’s suitable for somebody completely new to automated testing or DevOps, I’m not sure. It’s more an upper-end of intermediate level book IMHO. Aimed at those working in Java, the code is easy to map into other languages (C#, Python etc).Given the rate of change in computing (esp. browsers, mobile app development, virtualisation etc), it’s inevitable that the text is already (I’m writing this at end of May 2021) in need to an update. However, even without that update, it’s still very useful.Recommended, but with caveats mentioned above.

Yes