Making Java Groovy Paperback – Illustrated, 26 Sept. 2013

First of all, this is a very easy to read and humorously written book, with lots of wit in the text and footnotes (e.g. Java Swing is described as "the Swiss Army chainsaw of projects"). It isn't a book for learning Groovy -- this is covered only lightly in the text, with a long appendix about Groovy itself. It may be that the reader is assumed to have read Groovy in Action by the same publisher.As the title suggests, the book's approach is to demonstrate how one can use Groovy instead of Java. It doesn't consider Groovy in comparison to Python, Ruby or Scala, but instead shows how much easier and faster many things are with Groovy, and shows how to move stepwise from Java to Groovy. The third chapter covers integrating both Java and Groovy in builds in some detail -- my advice would be to skip this chapter and return to it after reading the rest of the book.This is definitely not for novice users; familiarity with Java is assumed. In fact, I think familiarity with other functional, dynamically typed languages would be helpful, given the light touch afforded to learning Groovy itself.The biggest strength of the book is on taking common Java scenarios and showing their Groovy equivalents, and how a codebase could move from one to another. These are very compelling and well done. If you're interested in writing code for any of these scenarios in Groovy instead of Java, then I'd recommend this book: a lot of the code here could form the basis for copying-and-pasting to solve your own problems. They include: XML reading and writing, JSON, testing, Spring, SQL (both raw SQL and Hibernate), MongoDB, ReST and webapps (using Grails).

It is not the first time I have the pleasure to read a book from Manning, but this book is probably one of the best I've ever read. The book is very good structured and it helps you understand how you can use Groovy to expand Java projects.The book is divided into three different parts. The first part is useful to all those who really want to understand how Groovy can help you in your day-by-day job. The second part of the book helps readers improve their daily work. Each chapter is full of real examples and is very easy to understand, the code is very good commented and simple to understand.The third part of the book presents even more good features of Groovy in the real-world application. I personally find this part is probably the most useful just because it is possible to find more examples which can be immediately used in the day-to-day work.ConclusionThe book is very well structured. Rarely, I read a book with this kind of structure and immediately valuable for your work. Every chapter is simple to read and full of examples which really help you to understand the real use of the language. The book concludes with three appendixes. They are helpful for people who want to upgrade the basic concept of the language and install the language in their own machine.

I'm an app developer at a place using Oracle applications that need to go from Java to groovy for specific updates. This book helped me set up our junit testing with groovy and other little set ups to ease the transition without a lot of heavy reading. Went straight to the chapter I needed and used the code samples and advice to get things working, was very helpful since none of us were excited about learning groovy.

Honestly saying I'm fan of whole 'In Action' series. The book is build in way when author guide you through all the features of a language showing how it works on real life examples. If your groovy experience similar to mine and consist of fragmental pieces of using groovy here and there than reading this book you'll see how the puzzle assembling into clean picture.

Great!

To those who are curious about Groovy, this book gives a spectrum of ideas about where and how it may be used.