Groovy in Action Second Edition PDF and Paper

Only 4 days ago, the paper version (pBook) of Groovy in Action was released, and with the release of the electronic edition (PDF, epub and mobi), all the editions of Groovy in Action, Second Edition, are fully available! So, what’s exactly covered in the book?

The book is divided into three parts. The first part of the book is about the Groovy language. The second part is about working with the Groovy library, while the third part dives into applied Groovy, showing you some best practices around tests and some other frameworks closely related to Groovy.

In the first chapters, the Groovy Basics are covered. The Groovy basics, as the name implies, covers the foundation of Groovy and gives a great start to grasp the language. This chapter is followed by the Groovy Datatypes and Collections, which really show the power and flexibility of Groovy, and showing the start of learning how to use functional programming with the Groovy programming language. This is completed by introducing Closures, one of the core language elements of Groovy. The chapters after this make the first part actually already a complete book, and we could have stopped there if we wanted to limit ourselves to the language only. But the reasons which make Groovy such a compelling choice is not only the flexibility of the language, but also the ecosystem around it.

So, in the second part of the book, the Groovy library, covers technologies like the working with the GDK (the methods added to the JDK by Groovy), Database programming (covering SQL as well as NoSQL databases), XML, JSON, Webservices, and a full chapter packed with tips on how to integrate Groovy into your current software pipeline.

To finish off, the 3rd part of the books (and we’re already 600 pages into the book by now) covers the focus of my work for the last 10 years, which is software testing. A lot of that knowledge has been put into the Groovy book, and I really hope it will prove useful in increasing the quality of your software. Besides testing software, concurrency, always a complex topic, and DSLs, which for me, is one of the most interesting chapters in the book, since it brings a lot the previously covered chapters together and shows some real world examples on how to build your own DSL.

I’d like to thank my co-authors from who I learned a lot about writing Groovy in Action, as well as the Groovy language! We really hope you’ll enjoy reading the book as much we had fun writing it, and if you have feedback, comments or compliments, let us know, we love to hear from you!