To my parents, to whom I owe everything in ways large and small.
To my children, who mean the world to me.
To my wife, for putting up with me and supporting me.
This book is organized into several chapters, starting from the most basic concepts. If you already understand a concept, you can safely move ahead to the next chapter. Although this book concentrates on Groovy, it also refers to other languages, such as Java, Scala, and JavaScript.
As the title suggests, this book is about learning Groovy but will also cover related technology, such as build tools and web frameworks.
This book assumes the reader already is familiar with Java syntax and basic programming ideas.
If you see text stylized like this, it is extra information that you might find helpful.
Text stylized this way is usually a reference to additional information for the curious reader.
Text like this is caution for the wary reader—many have fallen on the path of computer programming.
This is an exercise. We learn by doing. These are highly recommended.
Thank you to the following people without whom this book would not have been possible: my wife, for putting up with me working on yet another book; my editors, for all of the much needed editing; and my technical reviewer, Manual Jordan Elera, for doing the vital work of making sure everything in this book is accurate. Thank you to all of the developers behind Groovy and related projects written about in this book: Paul King, Cédric Champeau, Daniel Sun, and the rest of the Groovy team; Peter Niederwieser, the creator of Spock; Luke Daley and the rest of the contributors behind Ratpack; Adam Murdoch, and the rest of the developers behind Gradle; Graeme Rocher and the rest of the team behind Grails and Micronaut; and anyone else I’ve left out. Without these great tools and frameworks (and the openness, helpfulness, and friendliness of the community), programming would be much less enjoyable.
You can find out more at his web site: www.adamldavis.com .
He currently resides in Central Florida with his wife, two small children, and their dog.
is an autodidactic developer and researcher who enjoys learning new technologies for his own experiments and creating new integrations.
Manuel won the 2010 Springy Award—Community Champion and Spring Champion 2013. In his little free time, he reads the Bible and composes music on his guitar. Manuel is known as dr_pompeii . He has tech-reviewed numerous books for Apress, including Pro Spring, Fourth Edition (2014), Practical Spring LDAP (2013), Pro JPA 2, Second Edition (2013), and Pro Spring Security (2013).
Read his 13 detailed tutorials about many Spring technologies, contact him through his blog at www.manueljordanelera.blogspot.com , and follow him on his Twitter account @dr_pompeii .