I knew better, but despite that I decided to follow along with Agile Web Development with Rails without doing TDD. Anyway as I noted in an earlier post you don’t get to the testing section until about 150 pages in.
Apparently I was luckier than usual as I didn’t run into any show stoppers before getting to the testing chapter. Then I had some hard drive corruption and I had to recover from a backup. I ended up losing some of my code, but I just jumped back in test free. Of course I fell on my face doing the old, code check in browser routine.
Made a little error with the shopping cart class that I just couldn’t track down (something about a nil class). After about an hour of thrashing, I jumped backwards to writing unit tests around it. Within half an hour I found my logic error courtesy of a typo.
So I’m making better, faster progress now because I’m writing tests around everything. In the future even for wading through sample code, I’m requiring myself to do TDD. Slower is faster.