Beginning Groovy and Grails: From Novice to Professional Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Beginning Groovy and Grails: From Novice to Professional? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Beginning Groovy and Grails: From Novice to Professional. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Beginning Groovy and Grails: From Novice to Professional ReviewLet me start by saying "Beginning Groovy and Grails" is the book that the Grails community has been clamoring for. Two very good books kicked off the Grails revolution ("Definitive Guide to Grails" and "Getting Started with Grails"), but both predate the 1.x version of Grails by many dot-versions and many years (as of the time of this review, August 2008). BGG will certainly have worthy competition on the bookshelf before long, but right now it is the book that we all have been waiting for. Luckily, it easily lives up to the heightened expectations.
After reading BGG cover to cover, it seems to break naturally into three sections: Core Groovy, Core Grails, and Ancillary Grails. This division is mine, not the authors; the table of contents lists 13 chapters with no explicit section breaks. (Whether the three sections correspond to the three authors is an interesting question -- the tone of voice and writing style is consistent across the entire book.)
The first three chapters do an admirable job of covering the Groovy language from the basics to advanced topics. Groovy offers lots of syntactic sugar that might initially catch a Java programmer off-guard. These features, once you've seen them, dramatically reduce the lines of code you have to write. But more than that, there are some fundamentally new features in Groovy that don't have an easy match in Java. Builders, Expandos, metaprogramming, and DSLs are all discussed in these early chapters. While you don't have to use these features yourself to be successful in Grails, it certainly helps the reader understand how much of the Grails "magic" occurs under the covers.
The next three chapters (Introduction to Grails, Building the User Interface, and Building Domains and Services) hit the Core Grails features hard. These 150 pages do a great job of walking you through the basics of getting a Grails application up and running with a minimum of effort. They also make testing feel like a natural part of the development process (which it should be!). Rather than having a single chapter dedicated to testing, each new topic organically includes testing as a way to validate that the new code does what it promises to do.
The remaining chapters (Security, Ajax, REST, Reporting, Batch Processing, Deploying, and Alternative Clients) make up close to half the book. Each chapter covers the subject material as advertised, including working sample code. Not every Grails application will use every feature discussed here, but I still found a clever snippet of code here or a nice explanation of a general concept that rewarded me for reading every chapter.
Overall, "Beginning Groovy and Grails" delivers on its title -- if you are new to either (or both) technologies, you will be up and running before you know it. But don't be fooled by the title; even though it has "Beginning" in it, this book doesn't shy away from the advanced topics, either. This isn't a completist volume. Rather, it is a broad survey of the Groovy and Grails ecosystem. Christopher, Joseph, and Jim covered a lot of ground in an easy, readable way. I highly recommend it.Beginning Groovy and Grails: From Novice to Professional OverviewThe Rails web framework has taken the software industry by storm, offering legions of web developers the ability to create web sites faster and more efficiently than ever before. But taking advantage of Rails means learning an entirely new paradigm, in addition to the language Rails is built upon: Ruby. Accordingly, other developer communities have implemented their own versions of Rails, but built using their preferred language. For millions of Java developers, this native framework is Grails, and the Java-centric scripting language its built upon: Groovy.Beginning Groovy and Grails introduces Java developers to this popular framework and scripting language by guiding readers through the creation of a series of real-world projects. Each project introduces a new facet of Grails and Groovy, and affords readers the ability to download and experiment with the code. Authored by industry veterans Christopher Judd, Joseph Faisal Nusairat, and Jim Shingler, readers are treated not only to profound knowledge of the topic, but also to considerable insight shared as a result of the authors' combined decades of Java experience.See the following resources for more information on Grails and Groovy:Grails project website: http://grails.codehaus.org/Groovy project web site: http://groovy.codehaus.org/

Want to learn more information about Beginning Groovy and Grails: From Novice to Professional?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now