This book is intended for experienced developers. This primarily includes Grails developers who want to dig deeper into the architecture and understand more about how Grails works its magic and how it integrates with Groovy, Spring, Hibernate, and other technologies. Developers with experience in similar frameworks such as Spring MVC, JEE, or Ruby on Rails should find this book useful in understanding how Grails implements features to which they are accustomed.
This should not be your first Grails book, since it presumes a good deal of previous experience and understanding, so be sure to read a more comprehensive Grails book first.
Other Resources
There are many resources available if you would like to find out more about Grails and Groovy.
There is a significant amount of information at the Grails site, in particular the reference documentation. Likewise, the Groovy site has years of collective information available. For a more general overview of Grails, there are two books available that cover Grails 2: The Definitive Guide to Grails 2 by Jeff Brown and Graeme Rocher (Apress), and Grails in Action, Second Edition by Glen Smith and Peter Ledbrook (Manning). Programming Groovy, Second Edition by Venkat Subramaniam (Pragmatic Programmers) is an excellent resource for Groovy, and the second edition covers Groovy 2, and Groovy in Action, Second Edition by Dierk Knig et al. (Manning), when finished, will be a comprehensive reference for all things Groovy.
There are several conferences around the world that feature Grails and other Groovy-based technologies:
Spring One 2GX This is the largest and is held in the fall; it includes five tracks on Spring Framework technologies and four Groovy and Grails tracks Groovy and Grails Exchange Held in London each year in December GR8Conf US Held in Minneapolis each spring GR8Conf Europe Held in Copenhagen each spring Greach Held in Madrid each winter
All of these conferences have a significant amount of content on a wide range of technologies in the Groovy ecosystem, and they attract the top experts in the field as speakers.
Grails also has a strong user community. The User mailing list is quite active and is great place to ask questions. There are dozens of user groups across the globe, and hopefully one near you. See the group list page at grails.org for the active groups, and if there isnt one nearby, create one! Groovy Blogs is a blog aggregator that includes posts about Groovy and Grails technologies. Its a convenient way to stay aware of whats going on, and I recommend adding its Atom or RSS feed to your news reader. I write a regular This Week in Grails blog series that lists Grails- and Groovy-related blog posts, tweets, job postings, and upcoming conferences and user group meetings each week.
Conventions Used in This Book
The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
Italic Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions. Constant width
Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords. Constant width bold
Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user. Constant width italic
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Using Code Examples
This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, if this book includes code examples, you may use the code in this book in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless youre reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from OReilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your products documentation does require permission.
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