Grails in Action

I hand no chance to put my hands on first edition and barely started to read second edition which has just arrived to me. The reading is breathtaking. Of course you can find a lot of information in the Internet but when you go through a chain of selected topics the learning curve is steep and rapid. And of course it's paper. Paper still has its own magic! You know smell of new book. Also Mannig will provide you with electronic version. As soon as you get your printed version you'll find instructions inside how to get your electronic copy.

Not quite as easy to follow as I expected. It seemed some detail was left out of the many examples, and while I could have (and did) make the effort to figure them out, I still felt the material was incomplete. YMMV.

Explains really well. Great reference book.

So yes, Grails has been inspired by Rails, but even without me knowing much Rails it is evident that Grails is a super feature reach, extensible web framework that utilizes verified, well known components as Spring, Hibernate/GORM, Quartz, Active MQ and more which makes it stands out like on the shoulders of a giant. A very flexible, convention over configuration (makes a lot of heavy-lifting behind the scenes) system.The book itself is another shiny star: the author and publisher did a very good work in releasing a very thorough material. It is written the way I like it - by submerging a reader into deep waters - by jumping right into creating a working web application!Besides, I read not long time ago on another RAD tool - Flask. I was therefore able to look at Grails from the retrospective of a user of another web framework: what stood out is the absence of configs in Grails, or the extensive need to tackle them, and no numerous pip installs as in Flask. The impression I am under after reading this book, Grails is a super productive framework. And indeed, it works well with any databases (RDBMS' and NoSQL, even Graph databases) and seamlessly integrates with Java libraries.The book aims high, too - to make the reader not less than a Grails productive developer.Kudos to Peter and Glen! Who are advocates of Grails/Groovy, and successfully sell the Framework. Yet the authors have a unique talent of explaining things in simple words, e.g. closures, dynamic programming were explained elegantly.More on Grails and what is done well in the book: Ajax support is dynamically built-in, nice! Grails has a very strong, mature IoC implementation (I am impressed) Operating in the Cloud is well enough covered (a big bonus nowadays) The book covers the text search options using Searchable that may become Elasticsearch; Also covers RESTful services and how to expose API in your app to make it consumable from outside The book makes a quick stop (I advocate there should had been more coverage) on Single Page Apps with Angular.js There is a special emphasis done on protecting your application from malicious use or such common exploitations as SQL Injection; Performance tuning, legacy integration, database transactions, custom build processes, and even how to develop and publish your own pluginsI liked chapter 4 on building a UI, Ch 13 on RESTFUL services, and the Scheduling in Part 15 then 16 on NoSQL the most.If you ask me if I had any bad experience that would be the what I feel an excessive amount of time dedicated to testing code and various techniques to doing so, hey but it is really necessary.

Grails in Action is definitely a book I wish I had read before starting to work on Grails.Well written, easy and funny to read, it makes the process of learning Grails a pleasant journey. Theory is perfectly balanced with examples of code. When you finish the book you get the feeling that you really learned something useful that it will be a pleasure to use in your daily work.I read this book after having worked with Grails for 1 year I cannot tell if it's a good reading for newbies but it seemed to me all the concepts were explained in a very simple way, easily accessible also by programmers with little knowledge of programming in general. At the same time I found the book to be a good source of good insights that made me appreciate more and understand more deeply features of the framework that I was already using. Occasionally I've also found tricks that I think I will use in my daily work with Grails.One thing that I particularly appreciated about the book was the focus it puts on continuously testing the code. This is exactly the way applications should be developed with Grails and the author made it evident how easy it is to accomplish a task often seen as too painful and time-consuming.The chapters I appreciated the most were the ones related to the presentation layers. A plus for me (but this is subjective) is that the author decided to use AngularJS as a web development framework as a modern alternative to put the code in GSPs. The code was simple for me because I have used AngularJS in conjunction with Grails (and enjoyed the process) previously but I think that here too the author was able to find a very good balance in the information given, something particularly difficult when you need to introduce a new technology to show features of another one you are currently focusing on.Recently I have also had the chance to read excerpts of the previous version of the book and I think this new version greatly improves the previous one exploring new features of the framework and focusing more on testing the code. So, if you have a copy of the older one, you should still consider to buy this update.Disclaimer: I received a free copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

lack of code example

I recommend this book to all who work with the great Grails Framework to build simple- or complex Web Applications.Only drawback is, that this book covers up to Grails 2.3.x. But thats a minor issue, since Grails 2.4.x only has minor changes for most of the Framworks usage.

I'm very pleased with this purchase. I have not had it long but it has already paid for itself.I would say that this book is excellent for a Grails intermediate developer and probably very good for all other levels.

Grailsのインストールから、groovyの基礎 (2章)、テスト、Controller、Modelの役割、REST APIの作成、MongoDBへの接続など幅広く詳しく丁寧にまとめられています。今読んでいる途中ですが、読みやすい英語と解説でおすすめです。Railsを使ったことのある人なら、かなりわかりやすいと思います。

Really good guide to the framework. I'm up and running with my first project. The examples are good and well considered. I'm waiting for the equivalent Groovy book to be released (Oct 2014 from memory).