A few days ago, a manual tester reached out on LinkedIn asking for help on making a change from manual testing to test automation.

He wanted to know what good materials to buy so that he can get started on this transition.

I recommended 2 paid resources of Alan Richardson, none of them cheap, but worth the money:

Java For Tests (book)

Selenium WebDriver Basics With Java (online course)

None of them are free. The book is about $15 and the online course $225.

How do I know that they are good?

I used both of them a while ago and was satisfied with what I learned.

I try not to make recommendations to others for books, courses, blogs, unless I reviewed these materials by myself.

The materials are not free and especially the online course expensive. $225 is a lot of money compared to most (or all) Udemy courses, for example.

How can anyone be sure that they are worth buying?

Both the book and the online course allow you to preview them for free.

About 70 pages of Java For Testers can be read for free. A lot of lessons of the online course can also be previewed.

So anyone interested in either the book or the course should preview the free stuff to get a feeling of the author’s learning style, how clear his English is, how useful is the content, how good is the organization of the material, how fast or slow is the pace.

All these contribute to a good experience of reading the book or going through the course.

Let’s say that you like what you see.

The next question is …

Who is Alan Richardson?

He has a personal blog where you can read everything he blogged on in the last few years.

He also has a business blog where more information about him is available:

4 published books

• Java For Testers
• Automating & Testing REST API
• Dear Evil Tester
• Selenium Simplified

4 published online courses

• Java Selenium WebDriver API
• Technical Web Testing
• Evil Tester Talks Testing
• Technical Java Testing

Frequent speaker at conferences

From all these, he seems to be very engaged in the test automation field and actually pretty good at it.

It is difficult not to start trusting him after going through all these materials.

So, his materials are good quality, he knows what he writes about, he seems to be an important name in test automation (and testing).

But why are these materials so expensive?

The price can be an issue. Or maybe not.

$225 is expensive compared to $10 on Udemy, $5 on Amazon, free on Youtube.

But for $225, you get content that you verified as valuable, from an author who is credible, knowledgeable and skilled, content that will give you everything you need, content that will keep you engaged and satisfied with what you learn.

You will not need to check other courses or books.

You will not get demoralized because the content is poor or you don’t understand what the author says.

You will not waste any time or money.

You will start on the learning track and stay on it until you get where you wanted and that is to writing automation code.

$225 is the price for not wasting time, not checking online courses randomly, being motivated, knowing that you go the proper direction.

It is difficult to get wrong with these 2 materials for all the reasons already mentioned.

So, before you buy more Selenium materials, try doing a bit of homework about

• reading the author’s blog
• going through his free online materials, webinars
• reading about the author’s activity
• going through any previews of the paid material that you plan on buying

If after this investigation, you are still interested, do not focus so much on the price but on what you get for it.

As soon as you have your new skills, you will make $225 back in a week.

By the way,

I chose Alan Richardson as an example.

I could have written the same things about other great authors from the Selenium space such as Dave Haeffner, John Sonmez and others.

In summary, learning more about what you want to buy and who made it helps a lot with getting a product worth of your time and money.