Reviews for Beginning Groovy & Grails: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

1. Disappointing - needs a very thorough edit

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, July 12st, 2009

   The book tries to cover a lot of ground, but does it at too high a level, and with three authors, the result is noticeably and frustratingly variable in style.
   
   The Groovy section really isn't enough to teach you how to use the language, yet includes details without explanation. Eg a table of regex constructs is included without explaining the difference between the identical quantifiers listed under greedy, reluctant or possesive. At best, the Groovy section could be used as a refresher for people who already know Groovy.
   
   The Grails sections are obviously the reason for the book - but there are numerous errors and many times where particular conventions are not explained but merely used. The level of assumed intelligence and knowledge of the reader is incredibly variable. Some examples or code listings are only different in the most minute way from previous examples, and yet at other times other frameworks (eg Rails) are referenced in a way as to suggest the author assumes the reader is familiar. Further more the obvious things, such as being able to simply use named closures in controller for actions, are left for the reader to deduce from the examples, rather than stating it up front.
   
   
   If you know Java, then Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer (Pragmatic Programmers) is a great book.
   
   If you know Groovy, then the Grails documentation, including the user guides, available for free from the Grails site, are much better.

2. Great book covering a fantastic bunch of technologies.

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2009

   It starts out covering Groovy.
   * Basically Groovy gives Java a facelift, making for a more terse syntax and includes closures and meta programming capabilities to facilitiate "builders" which make doing component construct for things like Swing and XML document manipulation a snap.
   * For a more in depth I'd recommend Dierk Koenig's Groovy in Action, but there is enough here to get you up and running.
   
   Grails is a web framework that uses Spring & Hibernate under the covers. * It has it's own Object Relational Mapping technology known as GORM that is described quite well.
   * I think Id have preferred if the book had taken a full on explanation rather than a small amount early on (Ch 4) then take a step back and elaborate on this (Ch6).
   ** The early chapters made me questioning how to model a Person domain object with two self reference for mother/father or currency exchange rates with double reference to a currency say.
   ** But it gets covered eventually in chapter 6.
   
   The book uses a "to-do list" domain model.
   * Three client are created: Web, Swing and command line and they interact with RESTful web services.
   ** Third party libraries used for Swing include SwingXBuilder, Glazed Lists and JGoodies. There are passing references to JideBuilder and SWTBuilder too.
   *** I would have liked to have seen the JGoodies syntax elaborated on a bit here. But the external links were provided.
   ** JLine gets used for the command line interface.
   
   * The web client is Ajaxified with Scriptaculous for showcasing 'edit in place' and 'auto complete' features.
   * JasperReports are integrated into the solution and integrated with the Open Symphony Quartz scheduler to fire off "to-do" reports via email.
   * Gant gets a brief mention in Chapter 12.
   ** Groovy version of Ant. You don't need Ant Contrib to do conditional/loop processing.
   ** This gets covered in more depth in Groovy in Action.
   * Chapter 7 covers security.
   ** This chapter seems to deviate from the rest of the book. The topics covered don't seem to integrate as harmoniously as the other topics in the book.
   ** JSecurity, CAS and Acegi security get a brief mention.
   ** But there's not enough meat on the bone to sink your teeth into here. Acegi gets the lions share of coverage.
   Overall though the book made for a thoroughyly engaging read and is one which I highly recommend.
   
   I've recently tried to use some of the Grails code from this book and as the reader below indicated, it is rather buggy. The tests also seem fabricated. So, although the book gives you a fair overview, the precision in the details lets it down. Dave Kleins book is better for Grails as is the Jon Dickinson book. Consequently I've downgraded this review from 5 to 3 stars.