Giorgio Sironi has posted a review of a book to his site that shares fifty quick ideas to improve your tests that can help with things like run time, ease of maintenance and following best testing practices.

Fifty quick ideas to improve your tests is, well, a series of fifty quick ideas that you can implement on some of your automated test suites to improve their value or lower their creation or maintenance costs.

These ideas are pattern-like in which they are mostly self-contained and often independent from each other. They are distilled from real world scenarios that the authors (David Evans, Tom Roden and Gojko Adzic) have encountered in their work.

He's included a few quotes from the book he found particularly interesting including mentions of:

• a pyramid of software quality levels
• misunderstanding that testing can somehow be completely replaced by a set of carefully chosen examples
• difficult testing is a symptom, not a problem
• the problem with time-based "sleeping" in tests

You can find the book itself over on Leanpub and can pick up your own copy for around $10 USD.

The Laravel News site has released the latest episode of it's podcast, episode #28, covering Laravel 5.3.18, Yarn, Leanpub and more.

In this episode, we discuss Yarn, Facebook's new JavaScript package manger, the new Laravel Links section, and lots of other random topics.

This is our last podcast episode for 2016 and we will be taking a break until next year.

Other topics mentioned also include Laravel Links, case sensitive filesystems in development and Powershell for Mac/Linux. You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page player or by subscribing to their feed and getting this and other great episodes as they're released.

While not directly related to PHP and its community, several potential technical book authors out there will probably be affected by this. The popular publishing platform, Leanpub, has announced a change in their pricing to create new books with the service.

Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors. This platform is the combination of two things: a publishing workflow and a storefront. Leanpub is more than the sum of its parts, however – by combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks, it’s something different.

[...] Our workflow is flexible. Authors can use our simple in-browser editor or upload completed ebook files, but most choose to write their manuscripts on their own computers, using either plain text (formatted using Markdown or Markua markup) or Word documents. [...] Our storefront is an elegant way to sell in-progress or completed ebooks. [...] Our royalty rate is better than Amazon’s and Apple’s royalty rates for any book over $2.99, and it is far better than Amazon’s royalty rate for books over $10.

[...] Today we are changing the pricing of Leanpub. Until now, Leanpub has been totally free for authors to use. [...] Going forward, it will cost money to create a new Leanpub book. Here’s the cost: $99 per book.

Previously the only charges were a percentage of the sales for books on the storefront but moving forward, there will be a flat $99 USD cost for new books created wth the service (in addition to the same royalty rate as before). This helps to fund this great service and keep the level of quality authors have enjoyed so far. More details about the changes for new books and the "grandfathering" of current books can be found on this pricing page.

Hari KT has a new post to his site today about a book he's been working around around the Aura framework that provides the missing manual for v2 of the project. He's publishing it as a book over on Leanpub too, so it's easy to grab...and for free too.

Aura has an awesome collection of libraries for different purpose. [...] If you are new to aura, there is probably something you may want to figure out yourself. Some of the components have version 1 and version 2 releases. There is a question of which branch corresponds to which version. [...] But people new to aura may be having hard time to find the specific documentation or may be stuck sometime. [...] I was talking with Paul M Jones regarding the documentation lately, and he too shared some concerns. Talking with him gave me some inspiration to start the missing manual for the aura framework.

The goal of the book it to provide a good resource for people to learn about the framework/components and their use and to help promote Aura. The book is available for free either on Github or Leanpub (or, to help support Hari and the project consider purchasing a copy).

In a recent post to his site Paul Jones shares some work that's been done to help generate books in the Leanpub formatting with an Aura framework-based script.

One of the things that bothers me about some cli/console packages is how the commands you write with them end up being tightly coupled to the “framework” the package provides. [...] Most of the time I don’t need a “full console application” - I just need to read some input for the command, run my actual command logic, and send some output from the command. The Leanpub Sampler from Matthias Noback is an example of the kind of thing I usually end up doing in small or one-off projects.

The script makes use of the Aura.Cli component for console interaction then a custom object for the actual work. This completely decouples the CLI handling from the code to produce the resulting document. You can find out more about the Aura framework on the project's main site.