I went through an experience where 2 years ago I thought "I hate unit testing, don't know how to do it and don't see the value". 2 years later I think "I enjoy unit testing, know how to do it well, and see the value in unit testing _most_ of the time".
I believe this transformation is entirely to do with the fact that I paired with a brilliant developer every day for 6 months who really helped to answer all my questions and show me how to test a variety of different things. I truly believe that unit testing (and testing in general) is a hard thing to grasp without being able to learn from someone over a long(ish) period of time.
I realized that I hated testing because I didn't know how to do it and wasn't good at it. I also didn't understand what the essence of a unit-test was; my tests would often cross multiple integration boundaries (ie: hit the db and the server) and were really more like bloated integration tests. Once I had sorted that out and was able to see a variety of techniques for testing specific scenarios I realized that I actually enjoyed testing and the satisfaction of knowing my code was covered against defects started to be a big motivator.
To answer your specific question about JavaScript testing, I've been using JasmineBDD[1] for the last 2 years and have found it a joy to use. It really makes testing things easy and has tools that allow you to isolate your tests down to the individual units.
Lots! How to test-drive (as opposed to test-after), how to mock out integration points, what mocks/testdoubles/spies are and how they differ. I also learned that Enterprise Java is a particular level of hell. In all, it was a good experience though :)
I believe this transformation is entirely to do with the fact that I paired with a brilliant developer every day for 6 months who really helped to answer all my questions and show me how to test a variety of different things. I truly believe that unit testing (and testing in general) is a hard thing to grasp without being able to learn from someone over a long(ish) period of time.
I realized that I hated testing because I didn't know how to do it and wasn't good at it. I also didn't understand what the essence of a unit-test was; my tests would often cross multiple integration boundaries (ie: hit the db and the server) and were really more like bloated integration tests. Once I had sorted that out and was able to see a variety of techniques for testing specific scenarios I realized that I actually enjoyed testing and the satisfaction of knowing my code was covered against defects started to be a big motivator.
To answer your specific question about JavaScript testing, I've been using JasmineBDD[1] for the last 2 years and have found it a joy to use. It really makes testing things easy and has tools that allow you to isolate your tests down to the individual units.
[1] http://pivotal.github.com/jasmine/