Two New Groovy Titles

Just to prove we're not totally Ruby-centric, we just took two books on Groovy into beta.

Venkat has written Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer, a wonderful introduction to the language. And Scott Davis complements it with Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java.

Comments

[Rails Newbie]

After reading Zed, I am sorry that I bought your books.

[Dave Thomas]

You'll need to make up your own mind about whether what he says is true.

For what it's worth, I'm sad that he's leaving the community, as he had a lot to offer, and his style added a lot of energy.

He suggests that I hate him and mongrel: I don't believe I've ever talked with him, and have no opinion on him personally, other that the fairly obvious observation that he seems to be angrier than is healthy. And I definitely don't hate mongrel: we use mongrel on our site, and we use it as the deployment solution of choice in the Agile Web Development with Rails book.

Dave

[Dan Hinojosa]

Nice! I can't wait to read Venkat's and Scott's approach and differences from the 'Groovy and Action' book.

From my humble perspective, Groovy has been more productive to me than Ruby. That's because I am more familiar with the java API, and the language still has an intuitive approach to it and took less time to learn than Ruby. I have to admit for though for full disclosure, the pick axe book taught me more about code blocks and closures than any other book.

Re: The first comment. I am never sorry for acquiring knowledge from someone's interpretation of a language.

Thanks for adding Groovy to your series. ;)

[Claus Hausberger]

Great news. I love Groovy and especially Grails. Thanks for publishing those books.

BTW: I like your Pickaxe book a lot. Although I will probably be moving from Ruby to Groovy, but that has nothing to do with your book which I consider one of the best programming books out there together with the Perl book by Larry Wall and the C book by Kernighan/Ritchie.

[hmart]

Dear Dave,

Do you have a roadmap/plan for the next edition of AWDWR?. Now we are confused with the new Ruby 1.9 and Rails 2.0.*.
Also, I want to know if I can run Rails 1.8.6 and 2.0.2 in the same machine, I've googled about it but dont find a good advice,please publish an entry about it.

TIA

hmart

[James Edward Gray II]

Rails Newbie: I wrote about Dave too ( http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/dave_thomas_is_definitely_the_sammy_sosa_of_programming ), so now you can feel good about buying his books again.

[Ted Neward]

RailsNewbie, I spent easily two years on the road with Dave at various NoFluffJustStuff conferences, and I can tell you without a doubt that he's one of the nicest, most polite people I've ever dealt with in my life. (You want coarse and abrasive, you should try ME sometime, particularly on a speaker panel.) Dave's completely undeserving of the crap that Zed attributes to him, particularly about him as a person.

Dave's also a very bright guy, and doesn't agree with everything I say, but that's to be expected of somebody who's bright and opinionated and willing to discuss--and learn from it--various topics.

I should think I don't have to say this out loud, but maybe you shouldn't believe everything you read, whether it's about Zed or about Dave. Or about UFOs, for that matter.

[Dustin Whitney]

Terrific! I really think Grails is a nice framework for a lot of Java developers. Most of us have at least some familiarity with Hibernate and Spring, so being able to launch ourselves into an Agile web framework built on top of those two frameworks gives us a great head start. I've personally moved my hibernate mappings from a Java project into a Grails environment for a small project, and it was a total success.

I love the books you guys publish. Keep them coming!