Book Review: Building and Testing with Gradle by Tim Berglund and Matthew McCullough

My first reaction when I heard of Gradle was a sarcastic "Yay! Yet another build tool that will frustrate me when I use it on my enterprise projects". However, as I read through this book, I found a new promise to liberate me from the complex world of Maven. The authors have done a fantastic job of explaining how Gradle provides the flexibility of Ant, dependency management style of Ivy, the intelligent defaults of Maven, the speed and hashing of Git, and the meta-programming power of Groovy.

Highlights of this book:

- Easy to follow, lots of examples. I was able to run most of the examples without any hassle.

- You don't have to know Groovy to understand this book

- The last chapter covers how to do enterprise level multi-project builds. That was really helpful.

- No clutter or unnecessary information that you can find elsewhere. Nice, small book of 110 pages.

- I was able to complete this book in about 3 hours and I am a slow reader!

I had the pleasure of attending the No Fluff Just Stuff conference in 2011 and boy, was I impressed! Both the authors are very well respected in this field. If you have been living in the complex world of Maven where you are afraid to touch something because it might break something else, then this book is of you. If your enterprise is going to continue to use Maven, it does not in any way mean that you cannot unleash the power of Gradle. This book will teach you how to do that. As an added bonus, this book has been reviewed by Ken Sipe, the CTO of Gradleware, someone I know and respect!