recently i posted a couple of introductory articles on jmeter, a great apache open-source tool that allows you to measure the performance and scalability of a wide variety of services, especially web-applications.

i wrote these articles because although the online documentation provides reasonable reference material, it doesn't serve well as a jmeter introduction or tutorial.

things have changed a bit since then. the uk-based publishing house packt publishing were kind enough to send me a copy of emily halili's newly published book on jmeter, which is as far as i can tell, is the first book dedicated to the subject.

what's in the book

emily did a good job covering the basics of jmeter, and in certain cases, exploring the jmeter functionality in some depth. she outlines, step-by-step how to create a simple test plan. she includes copious screen-shots allowing you to easily follow along with the examples. in later chapters she describes how to put together much more sophisticated web-tests, including reading test data from files in a variety of ways, using regular expressions and iterators.

the book also briefly covers other great uses of jmeter, including load-testing database and ftp servers. although these sections are fairly light, they contain enough detail to get you started. it would have been great to see a SOAP/XML-RPC example too.

if you'd like to get a better feel for the quality of writing and the density of screen-shots, you can download chapter 6, a section of the book that packt provide for this purpose.

loosing the plot

personally, i think that emily misses the mark when she suggests using jmeter for acceptance and functionality testing. there are arguably much more suitable open-source tools for this type of testing, for example, thoughtwork's selenium testing framework. if you do want to head down this path, the book includes a detailed description of how to write and run this type of test.

conclusion

overall, if you are looking for a book to introduce you to jmeter and walk you step-by-step through creating a sophisticated web-based performance test, emily's book is a good choice.