Beginning Groovy, Grails and Griffon Paperback – 24 December 2012

I give 4 stars here. Everything is almost perfect if you come from a Java background. It start from a full java example, and then it simplify it step by step by using and explaining Groovy. Then it covers the cool features of the new Groovy 2, going more far away than I was expecting by buying this book. I was very happy with this part.Then you build a grails project from scratch so that you can feel the power (productivity) of the framework. It's really smooth curve learning if you already coded with any MVC java web framework. You pick then some example of Ajax and web service, without diving depth into the thing but still have a good overview of if.The griffon part is very tiny, it's more a introduction to the topic.Why does it miss a star ? I would have like to have some example from the editor about the Web Services, and the other thing is that the examples of the editor website not always work, but are easy to debug with very few changes.Finally, they made a very good job, with up-to-date version of the tools, the title of the book is correct, to the point : it's more "beginning in ..." than "reference book about...", even if the groovy part goes a little beyond "beginning".

This book is ok to get a quick overview of Groovy and Grails, but lacks detailed technical insights. Expect to have to pick up another book on each of these topics for details. It is good to have a short book like this to get an overview of the technology though. I am not impressed by the many many editing errors, the text and code examples have editing errors almost every few pages, which I think is not acceptable really. The last chapter on griffon is also a very brief one, again, expect to pick up another book to know more.Overall, I give it this rating because its good for an overview, but several detailed topics were not explained in sufficient detail, and due to the editing errors.

Very poor. Cannot be used as a reference document for Groovy. The index is not useful. I have not used the Grails or Griffon section. I would recommend anybody to take a look before purchasing this book.