Book Review: Beginning Groovy And Grails

Book Review: Beginning Groovy And Grails
Author: Christopher M Judd, Joseph Faisal Nusairat and James Shingler
Publisher: Apress Inc
ISBN: 978-1-4302-1045-0

What I was looking for was a good beginning Groovy book. What I found was a good beginning Grails book. I know that the book covers Groovy in the first three chapters but I was wanting a little more. Anyway, the book does cover Grails fairly well over the next 10 chapters albeit a little dated. The Groovy chapters covers just enough to get someone setup and starting to program in Groovy. But what I want to use Groovy for initially testing and mocking my Java code. Unfortunately this book really didn’t cover any advanced Groovy based topics. Oh, well I’m sure that it’s available in other books.

The Grails sections are far more complete. This book really takes you from creating a web app from scratch using Grails. From the initial configuration to security, restful web services and implementing a reporting system the book covers many of the important areas of creating a web application with Grails. It takes a good approach at explaining the basics and gives enough information in most cases to get to on the right track in more advanced development. You will probably want to reference other texts after this one to bring you more up to date with the latest versions of Groovy and Grails and to cover specialized issues.

I liked the book but in the few areas where it was lacking like more Groovy support it made it a harder read than I expected. In all fairness I cannot really recommend this book as there are others that may be better suited for a beginning Groovy and Grails introduction. It’s not that this book is terrible it just that others are better and this one is a little dated.