Reviews for Grails: A Quick-Start Guide

1. Great pragmatic introduction to Grails.

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2010

   * A great book on a fantastic technology which I believe all I.T. boffins should read and will enjoy immensely! If you want to be productive this is the technology for you.
   * It's an ideal first port of call to anyone wanting to learn Grails.
   - Although this is deemed for beginners, I learnt a couple of new titbits along the way and consider myself quite well read in Grails.
   - The 'uber generate all' and the use of filters to implement custom security in particular were new to me.
   * Dave did a great job of creating an application showcasing many of the salient features of Grails.
   * The book builds a web application based upon a Domain model that revolves around Events, somewhat like Meetup, bringing together Sponsers, Organizers, Volunteers and Tasks.
   - Along the way Dave also adds Forum functionality to allow threaded messages to be posted to an Event.
   * The application gets constructed and refined in a series of steps. I am particularly fond of this style of writing.
   - It's not like some stuffy disjointed reference or full of useless hello world examples. Very true to the Pragmatic series.
   * What I particularly liked about the book was the fast pace and clarity and Dave's in depth coverage of the default GSP's and controllers and how they interact.
   - This could have perhaps been improved with a quick reference diagram showing the interactions between GSP's calling controller actions.
   - But this is the best material I've seen for its clarity.
   * Dave gives copious examples of custom GSP tags in an attempt to keep business logic out of the view layer.
   - This is one of the things that Grails excels at compared to JSP or "shudder" JSF!
   * There is a smattering of Unit and Integration Tests included in the book too.
   * A Service is demonstrated to add a default set of Tasks for each event and showcasing how easy it is to deal with transactions and pull repeatable logic out of controllers.
   * Towards the end Dave incorporated a few plug-ins to enhance the functionality. These included: Searchable, Twitter, UI (for a Dialog) and Blurb.
   * As well as covering GORM - the Groovy Object Relational Modelling DSL (Domain Specific Language) for access, Hibernate Criteria Queries get a mention before Searchable 'big gun' gets a mention (based on Compass/Lucene).
   * At the end of the book, there is a useful appendix of blogs for luminaries in the Grails community that are a great resource too.
   * Dave is well known in the Grails community:
   - You'll also find Dave's work in Groovymag where he's a regular contributor where he showcases a plug-in each month.
   - He frequently provides feedback on the Grailspodcast.

2. great starter guide for grails

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, December 12th, 2009

   
   this is great book to enter the world of grails which suits those with existing java experience more but could be used by developers coming from other languages too. would recommend as a great starter guide. the prag prog groovy book is an ideal companion for this book as the groovy code detailed here is mainly in order to get the basic grails tasks performed that are required for the chapters in the book.

3. Perfect introductionary book

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, November 12th, 2009

   This book is a perfect introductionary book for grails. It goes through the most common use cases. You will get a pretty good understanding on what grails and groovy is and how do build a vanila web-application.