I’m a big fan of writing as little code as possible and borrowing everything else. I’m also a big fan of Groovy. I recently had the pleasure of reading Chris Judd, Joseph Nusairat, and James Shingler’s hip “Beginning Groovy and Grails” and in short, I loved it! This book is all about borrowing a slick web framework (and a lot of plug-ins) and leveraging the power and simplicity of Groovy to build web applications quickly.

I used this book extensively to build three different Grails applications and I found that the authors essentially covered everything one would need to it successfully. The first three chapters cover the basics of Groovy nicely, then the book dives head first into Grails with 12 valuable chapters covering GORM, Services, and using various plug-ins. Plus they cover deploying Grails applications, Ajax, and even do some cool stuff with JasperReports. I really liked how they consistently built upon a sample application throughout the entire book– that made comprehending what was going on a bit easier as you, as the reader, didn’t need to re-understand the domain.

In particular, chapters 7 and 8 proved quite helpful as they cover both security and Ajax. I did find myself wishing that the Acegi section went a bit deeper — I ultimately found myself adopting a JCaptcha solution as it proved to be a lot easier; regardless, their in-depth covering of all things related to security broadened my knowledge of the options available in Grails. I ended up using some Ajax components not covered in their Ajax section; however, they do a great job of adding some slick features to an application they build from scratch throughout the book.

I was hoping the Web Services chapter would go a bit deeper as I’m hoping Grails can become a widely adopted option for building RESTful applications; nonetheless, they do a great job of adding the essential CRUD operations to their example application. Plus they tie everything together nicely in the last chapter– 13.

If you are looking to learn Grails quickly, because it’s my bag, I can’t recommend this book enough– it covers designing, building, and deploying a Grails web application and it does so by continually building upon an ongoing application. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a command of Groovy either, as they do a great job in the beginning and throughout the book of demonstrating Groovy’s essence.