Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java (Pragmatic Programmers) [Paperback]

Scott Davis (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 11, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0978739299 | ISBN-13: 978-0978739294 | Edition: First Edition

Each recipe in Groovy Recipes begins with a concise code example for a quick start, followed by in-depth explanation in plain English. These recipes will get you to-to-speed in a Groovy environment quickly.

You'll see how to speed up nearly every aspect of the development process using Groovy. Groovy makes mundane file management tasks like copying and renaming files trivial. Reading and writing XML has never been easier with XmlParsers and XmlBuilders. Breathe new life into Arrays, Maps, and Lists with a number of convenience methods. But Groovy does more than just ease traditional Java development: it brings modern programming features to the Java platform like closures, duck-typing, and metaprogramming.

As an added bonus, this book also covers Grails. You'll be amazed at how quickly you can have a first-class web application up and running from ground zero. Grails includes everything you need in a single zip file⎯a web server (Jetty), a database (HSQLDB), Spring, Hibernate, even a Groovy version of Ant called GANT. We cover everything from getting a basic website in place to advanced features that take you beyond HTML into the world of Web Services: REST, JSON, Atom, Podcasting, and much much more.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Scott Davis is the Editor in Chief of aboutGroovy.com. He is also an author and independent consultant. He is passionate about open source solutions and agile development. He has worked on a variety of Java platforms, from JEE to JSE to JME (sometimes all on the same project). He is the co-author of JBoss At Work (O'Reilly), and author of Google Maps API (Pragmatic Bookshelf) and GIS for Web Developers: Adding Where to Your Web Applications (Pragmatic Bookshelf).

Product Details

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf; First Edition edition (January 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0978739299
• ISBN-13: 978-0978739294
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.8 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #342,286 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Scott Davis is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and software developer. His books include Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java, GIS for Web Developers, The Google Maps API, and JBoss At Work. He writes two ongoing article series for IBM DeveloperWorks: "Mastering Grails" and "Practically Groovy." Keep up with him at http://thirstyhead.com.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars outstanding and indispensable February 27, 2008

By S. M. Lauer

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I absolutely love this book. I have no idea how it would read for a newbie, but as a developer well-versed in Java and very familiar with Groovy, this is an incredibly empowering book.

I own and have studied, and liked, 4 other Groovy books, but since I am not using it full-time yet, I tend to forget just the stuff I would like to have at my fingertips just when I need it. Reading the other books is kind of like looking at a new car in the showroom: you see the features, but not much more. This book is like taking a test drive on a race course: you immediately experience the power of using it like it should be used.

The subtitle for this book could be: How to do incredibly useful things *immediately* with Groovy. As the author says in chapter 6, he's not a sys admin, but Groovy makes it almost enjoyable to do all the sys tasks a developer has to handle all the time.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Will it teach you Groovy from the beginning, will it teach you the internals? I don't know, all I do know is that each page tells you how to do something you need to do, how to do it quickly and easily, and it tells you in a way that clarifies a lot of what I have read in other books.

This is one of the most useful books I have ever read since K&R.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A great resource, but misleading title. May 11, 2008

By Michael Ernest

Format:Paperback

I got this book after hearing the author speak at JavaOne. His talk covers the content of the first chapter along with a few other items, but I didn't mind. It was quite helpful to read through the points and examples he made and try them out at my own pace.

The book is driven by a series of insights rather than complete, formal coverage. I found this approach very useful to getting started and experimenting. The writing is clear, light-hearted, and relaxed, especially in the beginning.

Towards the end of the book, the explanations wane a bit. The sample code is more often given without an introduction, beyond the section header. I was less sure what was going on in some of these cases, as I had gotten accustomed to picking things up very quickly in the beginning. The explanations that followed these code bits were good enough, but I missed that sense of the author's energy from beginning to end of each section.

I don't understand at all why it's called Groovy Recipes. There aren't any. The examples illustrate very well the power of this tool, but I didn't see anything that amounts to, say, the Groovy way to mine a web page, create an IM interface, read mail, etc. If you are looking for code you can apply immediately to some series of problems, this isn't the one.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The K&R of the Groovy World April 29, 2008

By Neal Ford

Format:Paperback

(Disclaimer: I know Scott Davis, but don't hold that against him)
Groovy Recipes does what the title says: gives you recipes for how to get stuff done in Groovy. But that's only part of the value of this book. It also teaches how to become an idiomatic Groovy developer. And that's incredibly important. The classic book on C, the K&R book The C Programming Language, did 2 things for C. First and foremost, it taught developers about the c programming language. But the second more subtle thing it did was to teach developers how to be idiomatic C programmers. I can remember reading the book and marveling at the conciseness of the code, which had as much to do with the way the language was used as the language itself.
Anytime you learn a new language, you have 2 battles: first, learn the syntax (which is the easiest part -- it's just details of how familiar concepts are expressed in the new syntax). The second battle is the more important one: how to become an idiomatic programmer in that language. Developers new to a language tend to write new code just like code from their former language, using new syntax. Only when they've had time to steep in the better, more elegant ways of expressing yourself in a new language do they truly become proficient. That's what Groovy Recipes does for Groovy developers. It shows not just the syntax, but how to idiomatically use that syntax to become proficient with Groovy. Groovy is a much more powerful language than Java. While you can take a Java source file and rename it with a groovy extension and have it still work, you're writing Groovy code like a Java developer. After you've seen and used Groovy for a while, you start writing code like a Groovy developer. The Groovy Recipes book is two things: recipes for using Groovy to solve problems. But, more importantly, it teaches idiomatic Groovy programming, which is the long-term benefit of the book. It is an excellent book, well written and highly informative.