As every soldier knows his weapons, a programmer must be familiar with the development ecosystem and those tools that make programming much easier. Whether you are already using any of these tools at work or home, it is worth taking a look at many of them and comparing their features, advantages, and disadvantages. Let's get an overview of what we can find nowadays about the following topics and construct a small project to get familiar with some of them.

We won't go into the details of those tools and frameworks, since that will be done later on in the following chapters. The goal is to get you up and running, and provide you with a short overview of what they do and how.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Git
• Virtual machines
• Build tools
• The integrated development environment
• Unit testing frameworks
• Hamcrest and AssertJ

• Code coverage tools
• Mocking frameworks
• User interface testing
• Behavior-driven development