For beginners and new bees, you should first know that Selenium is not a “SOFTWARE TESTING TOOL” like UFT, Rational Robot or Silk. Its a bunch of jar files which are open source (that means they are free) which can be used for performing an automated test effort on any web application. We refer these files as Web Drivers. Ok, Web Drivers.. because these jar files are meant to drive an automated test effort on web applications only.
Well, there are a lot of sources over the internet which suggest learning Selenium without any prior knowledge of what code is. Now, this can be a bit tricky and confusing eventually. You will start off with an online course, and eventually, you will be struck between conceptual understanding which makes the whole learning experience sore.
So, a good idea to learn some basics of Java or whichever other languages that Selenium supports (like Phyton, C, C#) and then get into working with the nuts and bolts of Selenium Test Automation.
So, how much Java should you know?
You should know the core essentials of Java, which are ..
1) What is Java (Wikipedia is a great place to look up such kind of info)
2) How to install Java JDK (Youtube is a great choice to get all the basic directions you need)
3) Now you need a development environment to write the Java code on
- Preferably you can use Eclipse or IntelliJ (both are pretty easy to use). These are also open-source tools which are available for free to download.
4) But if you are not sure you want to install anything as yet, I would suggest you use an online compiler, like https://www.compilejava.net/ ; For this, you don’t need any installation. It’s easy to write and execute.
But the good thing of having a development tool like Eclipse or IntelliJ is that it will give the user the directions to handle errors and issues, and also provide the required suggestions in order to write good quality code. Makes life easier!
5) Ok, so you now have Java and you have a development tool to work on it. Now, here is the list of topics you should consider to learn as a Java 101
1) Basic Jave concepts
2) Conditionals and Loops
3) Arrays
4) Classes and Objects
5) Exception, Lists, Threads and Files
That’s it!!
Now, this will give the strong foundation you need to be able to learn Selenium.
So now, go ahead and visit https://selenium.dev/ and download the latest selenium jar files, and kick off your journey to effective test automation development.
Happy testing!!
The skill development methodology used in our job placement program at Resolve6 use a bunch of such 101 techniques to make our candidates, a skill test automation developer