Hey everyone! Is there a more recent book on Grai...
# questions
j
Hey everyone! Is there a more recent book on Grails development? Seems like all the books I'm finding are very old. If not then can you direct me to some good sources on the web. Something other than the Grails home site? I appreciate your time. Thank you!
j
I do not believe anyone has published a book on recent versions of Grails. The Grails guides site and the user guide are good resources.
j
Thank you Jeff!
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j
There are also a number of good examples in the functional test suite: https://github.com/apache/grails-core/tree/7.0.x/grails-test-examples And the 7.0.0-SNAPSHOT docs have had a lot of updates: https://docs.grails.org/snapshot/guide/single.html
j
Thanks James!
p
What about a community published book? where we have multiple contributors for different chapters and peer reviews?
j
If you are asking if that exists, afaik it does not. If you are asking if that is a good idea that is waiting for someone to lead it forward, I say absolutely a good idea.
While preparing Grails 7 is a great time to do that. For one of the Grails 2 books we were writing the book while we were developing the release and there were times I wrote about something before it actually worked, and writing about it was part of firming up requirements.
One nice thing about that approach is it eliminates the time gap between when the release comes out and when someone starts writing about it which would mean you might be point releases into it before a book is available. Having the book available earlier would help organizations get started and would make Grails 7 even more approachable.
p
Not asking about existence but about getting together to make something for G7, I've seen open books written in GitHub and then published with a nice formatting, etc. and there are many printers that can print books on demand for people that wants the paperback version. Though we could also contact a formal publisher.
I think books are nice because allow to explore more than the docs, provide examples, challenges, etc. and some topics can be discussed in more depth, like integrations (e.g. elastic search), prod deployment (PaaS, infrastructure, maintenance, virtualization/dockerization), scaling, databases (sharding, clustering, etc), stuff that is related to Grails but is not Grails per se.
j
If there is interest in a formal publisher, the requests have slowed down because we kept saying no but for a period Apress was reaching out every year or so and each time a major release came out asking if someone on the team was interested in taking on the next edition of Definitive Guide To Grails. There was an effort that started maybe 3 years ago with them but the book never got written. It would surprise me a little if they had no interest in discussing it. I don’t think there is anything wrong with doing it without a publisher, just tradeoffs.
p
I think it's healthy to have a book published for G7, for its community and for newcomers. If it's electronic-only, I don't mind. Even if the book is free, I don't mind. I guess having a publisher helps with the paper version, marketing and distribution. Though that won't be free and it'll generate some royalties, which might go to the authors, though if we do it in community, those can go the the foundation? Though that would be marginal, so I don't care much.
I guess the main guys really pushing G7 out can choose what they think is better. Anyway, I would love to help if that idea gets realized.
j
I would like to help in some way. I know I started the thread with looking for a more recent book, but my team is just now in the process of upgrading to Grails 6 and most books out that don't even cover Grails 5. Just a thought!
p
I feel your pain, you might need to rely on online resources and trial and error, I did something similar for G3 -> G5, and I think maybe next year I'll go G5 -> G7. I know, I'm odd ... πŸ€¦β€β™€οΈ
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j
While a book would be ideal, I would first encourage people to update the Grails Doc project since we now have merged all documentation into a single repo. That project basically is a book and I have been updating it as I have time to modernize it
Pull Requests are welcome and I will prioritize reviews for any documentation updates
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