❯ Guillaume Laforge

Groovy in Action, Manning

conference groovy

Yesterday, while blogging about the latest Groovy and Grails news, I mentioned the arrival of Groovy in Action soon to be published by Manning. And I forgot to show you the beautiful cover of the book. “Groovy in Action” is mainly written by Dierk Koenig, assisted with Andrew Glover, Paul King, Jon Skeet and myself. James Gosling was kind to write us a foreword for the book, and when I met him at JavaDay 2006 two weeks ago, it was such a delight to hear him telling me that he had used Groovy in a couple of projects at Sun and that he liked it very much!

For a first taste of the book, here is the abstract:

Groovy in Action is a comprehensive description of the Groovy programming language, its libraries, and its everyday use. With the release of JSR 241, Groovy has become the second standard language for the Java platform. The book introduces Java developers to the new dynamic features that Groovy brings to this platform.

The first part of the book explains the basic parts of Groovy: datatypes, control flow, object model, and handling specifics. The second part elaborates on enhancements that Groovy brings to standard Java development: builders and template engines, JRE improvements (GDK), integration options, and the special support for XML, regular expressions and database programming. The hands-on experience part of the book presents various tips & tricks for daily programming work, covers unit testing and build support, and shows how to even script Windows via Groovy. An additional bonus track is dedicated to Grails, the Groovy Web Application Framework.

Groovy in Action introduces the language by example, showing lots of reusable pieces of code while explaining the underlying concepts. Java developers who are new to Groovy will find a smooth transition into the dynamic programming world. Groovy experts will find new aspects and triggers of creativity as well as a solid reference.

Despite only the first few chapters are available through the Early Access Program, if you’re curious to know what’s going to be in the book, Dierk Koenig provided table of content on the Groovy mailing-lists.