Taking some time to keep on learning.

Since I am unemployed and not having anything better to do with my time I decided I would check out "Apache JMeter" by Emily H. Halili (Packt, 2008).

It's a light read and I found that Chapter 7 (Advanced Features) was the most helpful to myself as I am not a n00b to JMeter. However, I felt that Chapter 7 would have been better served if BeanShell processing would have been tackled. I've found from my load testing experience in the past that at some point the return HTML is gonna have to be sliced and diced and data extracted that cannot be done with a simple RegEx extraction (like what is covered in Chapter 7 of the book).

Other than that, I think that if you are a total n00b to JMeter it isn't half bad as a simple introduction to using JMeter for performance/load testing. There's a lot more to performance/load testing than the book covers such as metrics collection, number crunching, et cetera but the book doesn't purport itself to be the end all be all of explaining performance/load testing so I can't complain.

Three stars.

And that job is toast!

Well. Got laid off today with 20 other folks from the Dallas area. Cannot say that I am surprised. Good thing I've been saving up for this possibility. Didn't get to keep the Uberlaptop of Powah (and I wasn't gonna pay the $3700 to keep it).

I don't expect to get another job in December but I have some possibilities lined up in January. What am I gonna do with that time? Hmmmm. Wasn't GTA IV just released? Too bad I don't have a machine capable of playing the PC version and I'm not going to pay for a console while laid off just to play GTA IV.

I have no doubt that my load testing adventure will continue in January.

One thing for sure. The past seven months has been a waste. Thanks a lot, VT. Same back atcha.