QuickTest Professional Unplugged: 2nd Edition Paperback – 18 Oct. 2011

Back in the early 1980's, when many of today's senior IT people were learning their craft on Z80 or 6502 based machines, many very successful techie books were little more than collections of listings of useful bits of code. That was before the World Wide Web and Internet Explorer etc. Once the web appeared and search engines grew to be the powerful beasts that they now are, books that are little more than collections of listings pretty much disappeared, as anybody with connectivity moved to using Google etc to find examples of code that they could re-use or adapt."QuickTest Professional Unplugged" is a throwback to the early 1980's. I was hoping that this book would include information about best practices, how to use QTP successfully in a team environment, an Agile environment, a distributed environment etc. Basically, I would have liked this book to have given readers a head start on how to use QTP successfully in a modern, commercial, development environment. Unfortunately, it contains none of that information. Instead, it is a collection of listings of varying standard. Yes, some of those listings might be useful starting points to implementing particular automated tests, but if I want a code snippet I either just write it (none of these are rocket science), or Google it. When I pay as much as this book costs (it is not cheap) I would like it to contain material that I cannot easily Google.I bought this book after seeing a copy on the corner of a desk at an office I used to work in. With hindsight I should have waited for the person whose desk it was to reappear and ask him/her about the book. Instead, I went onto Amazon, discovered there were pretty much no other QTP books and so ordered this one. I now know why the book never seemed to move from the corner of that desk - I suspect the owner never used it. Having quickly read it, my copy is going back onto the shelf, where it will probably sit until the next time I have a clear out to make space...Not recommended unless you are just looking for some code snippets (in which case you might want to try Google first anyway).