Resources for Grails Development
If you are thinking about getting started with Grails, what are some of the resources you should know about? Here's what I'm using to get me started . . .
- The starting point is the Grails website
- For books, I bought The Definitive Guide to Grails (a great overview - make sure to get the second edition), Grails in Action (still in pre-release, but worth paying for the PDF), and the indispensable Groovy Recipes which gave me a real sense of comfort with Groovy - as well as providing a bunch of useful snippets for getting started.
- For magazines, you're going to want to check out Groovy Mag
- For blogs, check out Groovy blogs for a pretty good aggregation of what's up with Groovy and Grails.
- In terms of Grails, download Grails 1.1 - even though as of this posting it's only RC1 - a lot of the books and postings will assume you're on 1.1
- For IDE's I'd *strongly* recommend a 30 day trial of IntelliJ IDEA - a fully featured version is available for only $250, although Netbeans is a free alternative and there is a (from what I can tell rather limited) plugin for Eclipse.
- If IDE's are a little bloated for your tastes, Textmate users should check out the bundle. If you use notepad, Vi or Emacs I'm gonna assume you don't need no stinkin' code completion and leave it at that :-)
I'll definitely second (and third) the Groovy Recipes book. It's an awesome book for getting a sense of why Groovy is so much easier to work with - yet so much more powerful - than Java.
TextMate and the Groovy/Grails bundle is also a good approach (and TextMate has so many language bundles, including decent CFML support). TextMate is worth the (low) price.
@Sean, I'd heard so many good things about IntelliJ for Java development that when I heard all of the great things the Groovy and Grails teams say about Groovy/Grails support I decided it was worth changing IDEs to get the much better features. But I don't do a lot of Flex so I'm not tied to Eclipse for that. I'm still using CF Eclipse for ColdFusion, but I would urge anyone to at least try IntelliJ as the Eclipse plugin really doesn't give you a sense of how nice the overall dev experience can be compared to using IntelliJ. That said, I get why it could make sense to stay with Eclipse for a single IDE. The Textmate bundle isn't bad, but it's more of a personal preference. If you're a Textmate guru and think IDE's are a bit heavyweight, you'll like it.
@Sean, Yep. I'll be doing a series of "getting started" tutorials. Mainly aimed at my dev environment (Mac OS X) from downloading and setting the path to getting MySQL configured and getting going. Don't want to replicate the stuff that is already well documented, but I'm hoping to create a fairly useful series of postings for anyone interested in giving Grails a try.