19 Nov 2016

Grails 3 Book - Update

This is the first in bi-weekly updates I’ll be posting updates on what I’ve been working on for Practical Grails 3.

Reviewers

I’d like to announce the first two technical reviewers:

• Jaclyn Helgeson - A Grails and Spring developer. She has a great attention to detail and comes with a strong Grails 2 background.
• Roberto Perez - Active in the Grails community with blog posts and answering questions on Slack, founder of LA GUG as well. Roberto will also be doing the Spanish translation.

Progress

Updated to 3.2.x

When I started writing 3.1 was the latest Grails release. I’ve been tracking 3.2 with all the new features but until last week I was unable to update the book because of a few plugins. I’ve worked with the plugins authors and happy to say the first copy of the book will ship with the latest 3.2 release as the examples!

Automation

One main goal of this book is to be a living book, when new releases of the Grails 3 are released, there will be an update with new features and a changelog. To this end I’ve been playing with ways to allow me to easily change things (like the Grails version) and apply them through all the examples. With some git trickery and bash glue I have a pretty good system down!

Building and testing

The basics of the unit and integration tests chapters are flushed out.

Release

I’ve decided to not release a sample chapter until the early access is released in mid December. This is mostly due to the book content moving around.

That said early access is still on track for this December!

Up next

I’ve setup a public Trello board if you’d like to track progress. Please note not all tasks are here, but I’ll begin posting more.

Status updates are now tracked on the feedback issue tracker - easier to have them all in one location!

Stats

A few stats:

• Over 350 people have signed to be notified when the book is published. You can sign up too at https://www.grails3book.com.
• 82 Followers on Twitter - I’ll be putting more updates out via Twitter to grow this audience as well.

Not a walk in the park

Writing a book isn’t easy - I knew this when I started. Inspiration, time, and life don’t always line up to allow progress to move as fast as I’d like. Kind words, encouragement from the community, and the desire to learn more keep this book moving forward.

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