The Definitive Guide to Grails,
Second Edition (Experts Voice in
Web Development) by Jeff Brown
Interesting And Comprehensive
The rise of Ruby on Rails has signified a huge shift in how we build web
applications today; it is a fantastic framework with a growing community.
There is, however, space for another such framework that integrates
seamlessly with Java. Thousands of companies have invested in Java,
and these same companies are losing out on the benefits of a Rails–like
framework. Enter Grails.
Grails is not just a Rails clone, it aims to provide a Rails–like
environment that is more familiar to Java developers and that employs
idioms that Java developers are comfortable using, making the adjustment
in mentality to a dynamic framework less of a jump. The concepts within
Grails, like interceptors, tag libs, and Groovy Server Pages (GSP), make
those in the Java community feel right at home.

Grails’ foundation is on solid open source technologies such as
Spring, Hibernate, and SiteMesh, which gives it even more potential in the
Java space: Spring provides powerful inversion of control and MVC,
Hibernate brings a stable, mature object relational mapping technology
with the ability to integrate with legacy systems, and SiteMesh handles
flexible layout control and page decoration.
Grails complements these with additional features that take
advantage of the coding–by–convention paradigm such as dynamic tag
libraries, Grails object relational mapping, Groovy Server Pages, and
scaffolding.
Graeme Rocher, Grails lead and founder, and Jeff Brown bring you
completely up–to–date with their authoritative and fully comprehensive
guide to the Grails framework. You’ll get to know all the core features,
services, and Grails extensions via plug–ins, and understand the roles that
Groovy and Grails are playing in the changing Web.
What you’ll learn Discover how the Web is changing and the
role the Groovy language and its Rails framework plays. Get to know the
Grails Project and its domains, services, filters, controllers, views, testing,
and plug–ins. Experience the availability of plug–ins for Rich Client and
Ajax, web services, performance/utilities, scheduling, security,
functionality, and even Persistence. See how Grails works with other
frameworks like Spring, Wicket, Hibernate, and more. Create custom
plug–ins in Grails.
Who is this book for? This book is for everyone who is looking for a
more agile approach to web development with a dynamic scripting
language such as Groovy. This includes a large number of Java
developers who have been enticed by the productivity gains seen with
frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, JRuby on Rails, etc. The Web and its
environment is a perfect fit for easily adaptable and concise languages
such as Groovy and Ruby, and there is huge interest from the developer
community in general to embrace these languages.
Personal Review: The Definitive Guide to Grails, Second Edition
(Experts Voice in Web Development) by Jeff Brown
The Definitive Guide to Grails, Second Edition (aka DGG2) is no doubt the
best Java book I've ever read, and for what it's worth mentioning I read it
from cover to cover. It was not only because it was about Grails I meant to
get skilled at, but also for its comprehensive English language. I took the
liberty of writing complete reviews of each chapter on my blog, so it kept
me busy almost 3 months to digest all the Grails goodies Graeme and
James collected in their book. Although it was my second book about
Grails (after "Beginning Groovy and Grails: From Novice to Professional") I

couldn't stop reading it. The more I read the often I asked myself why it
took me so long to appreciate Grails features. The book covers the
features of Grails 1.1 which was in beta while the book was written yet the
material didn't get outdated with its final release. The authors made all the
efforts to ensure the book is complete and up-to-date even though Grails
1.1 was not available at that time yet.
I don't want to spoil your reading of the book and its unique style of
explaining Grails features by its authors, so if you're like me chasing the
simplicity of Grails and trying it out in your projects that's definitely a book
you have to read. There are almost 650 pages divided into 17 chapters
and one appendix about Groovy - the language of Grails. You shouldn't
afford yourself just to read it once - you might easily fail to notice all the
gems presented in this book. There are so many that even reading it twice
might not be enough. I had a pleasure to read it once, underline all the
stuff I considered useful and used it in the reviews afterwards. All in all I
think I read it a couple of times and I always found something new I'd
missed earlier. I must admit that after a few weeks I was even completely
fed up with Grails as there were too much to digest. It reminded me of
reading a science book with lots of equations, examples and their
explanations - even if I enjoyed it and could read it over night, the best bet
to not get swamped was to read it chapter by chapter or even section by
section and do the samples myself. DGG2 was not different. It contains the
gory details of Grails presented by its project lead and its project member,
so who else could bring you the latest stuff right and in details?
It's definitely a definitive guide to Grails. I don't think Grails could have
been presented better than what you can find in the book. I'm sure many
could share my view that one can't call himself a Grails expert unless (s)he
has read the book. You can't simply let yourself miss the pleasure of
reading the book. It's like you never programmed with Java IDE and be
once presented with its features one by one in a very organized manner.
You'll surely get astonished how much you missed for so long. So will
happen to you after reading this book. No matter whether you're a Grails
developer now or want to become one soon, you'll come across many
ground-breaking solutions of Grails in this book. It is highly recommended
for anyone who keeps looking for the Holy Grail of the web application
frameworks. It could just be Grails after all.
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