Learn

Welcome to the learning section of the Groovy website.

First of all, you will need to get started by installing Groovy on your system or project.

Once all set up, we invite you to have a look at the Groovy documentation, which explains all the details of the language, such as how to use the tools that come with a Groovy installation, and how to tackle more complex tasks with the various module user guides.

But there are other ways to learn more about Groovy, thanks to books and presentations given about Groovy at conferences.

Books

Another great approach to learning Groovy is to read the various books published on the language:

Groovy in Action, Second Edition

By Dierk König, Paul King, Guillaume Laforge, Hamlet D'Arcy, Cédric Champeau, Erik Pragt, and Jon Skeet

The undisputed definitive reference on the Groovy programming language, authored by core members of the development team.

Making Java Groovy

By Ken Kousen

Make Java development easier by adding Groovy. Each chapter focuses on a task Java developers do, like building, testing, or working with databases or restful web services, and shows ways Groovy can help.

Programming Groovy 2

By Venkat Subramaniam

Dynamic productivity for the Java developer

Groovy 2 Cookbook

By Andrey Adamovitch, Luciano Fiandeso

Over 90 recipes that provide solutions to everyday programming challenges using the powerful features of Groovy 2

Groovy for Domain-Specific Languages - Second Edition

By Fergal Dearle

Extend and enhance your Java applications with domain-specific scripting in Groovy

Groovy Goodness Notebook

By Hubert A. Klein Ikkink

Experience the Groovy programming language through code snippets. Learn more about (hidden) Groovy features with code snippets and short articles. The articles and code will get you started quickly and will give more insight in Groovy.

Learning Groovy

By Adam L. Davis

Start building powerful apps that take advantage of the dynamic scripting capabilities of the Groovy language. This book covers Groovy fundamentals, such as installing Groovy, using Groovy tools, and working with the Groovy Development Kit (GDK). You'll also learn more advanced aspects of Groovy.

Grails 3: A Practical Guide to Application Development

By Eric Helgeson

The first book dedicated to Grails 3. You will learn the concepts behind building Grails applications. Real, up-to-date code examples are provided so you can easily follow along.

Falando de Grails

By Henrique Lobo Weissmann

For Groovy and Grails developers, authored by the founder of Grails Brasil based on his experiences as a Groovy and Grails consultant.

Presentations

Many Groovy-related presentations have been recorded at conferences that you might wish to have a look at, to learn more about Groovy, delve into particular topics, and more.

Below are a few selected presentations given at Groovy-related conferences.

The Groovy ecosystem revisited

By Andrés Almiray

slides

Groovy is a well established player in the JVM since a few years ago. Its increased popularity across the years has spawned several projects that conform the Groovy Ecosystem. You've probably heard of Grails, Gradle, Griffon and Spock. But what about the rest of projects that are just waiting around the corner to be discovered and make your life easier? This talk presents them tools and libraries that use Groovy as the main driving force to get the job done.

Metaprogramming with the Groovy runtime

By Jeff Brown

The dynamic runtime nature of Groovy is one of the things that sets it apart from standard Java and makes it a fantastic language for building dynamic applications for the Java Platform. The metaprogramming capabilities offered by the language provide everything that an application development team needs to build systems that are far more capable than their all Java counterparts. This Part 1 of 2 will cover the runtime metaprogramming capabilities of Groovy. The session will dive deep into Groovy's Meta Object Protocol (MOP) which implements the incredibly dynamic runtime dispatch mechanism. The session will include a lot of live code demonstrating really powerful runtime features of the language. This session is focused specifically on Groovy's runtime metaprogramming capabilities. Part 2 of 2 will cover Groovy's compile time metaprogramming capabilities

Groovy Puzzlers

By Noam Tenne

Remember the epic Java Puzzlers? Here's the Groovy version, and we have some neat ones! Even though we are totally a Grails shop here at JFrog, some of these had us scratching our heads for days trying to figure them out. And there is more! Contributions from the truly Groovy senseis, including Guillaume Laforge, Andrés Almiray, Tim Yates, Ken Kousen make this talk an unforgettable journey to Groovy. In this talk, you'll have the expected dose of fun and enlightenment hearing about our mistakes and failures, great and small, in hard core Groovy/Grails development.

You can find more presentations:

Courses

Another great resource for learning Groovy is through a course. You could spend time hunting down various videos on the web but these courses have all the information you need packed into one place.

The Complete Apache Groovy Developer Course

By Dan Vega

I am going to teach you everything you need to know to start using The Groovy Programming language. If you're a beginner programmer with a some experience in another language like Python or Ruby this course is for you. Dynamic languages are generally thought of as easier for total beginners to learn because they're flexible and fun. If you're an existing Java Developer (Beginner or Experienced) this course is also for you.

This course is packed with almost 14 hours of content. We are going to start off with getting your development environment up and running and then go through the very basics of the language. From there we are going to build on that in each section cover topics like closures, meta-programming, builders and so much more.

Groovy Fundamentals

By Ken Kousen

Learn the advantages of using Groovy by itself and with existing Java projects. This video workshop takes you into the heart of this JVM language and shows you how Groovy can help increase your productivity through dynamic language features similar to those of Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk.

Practical Groovy Programming

By Ken Kousen

Take your basic Groovy skills to the next level with this practical video workshop. Presenter and Java consultant Ken Kousen shows you how to work with XML and JSON, implement runtime metaprogramming, and use several AST transformations. You'll also dive into operator overloading, Groovy SQL, and the Groovy JDK.

Mastering Groovy Programming

By Ken Kousen

Learn advanced techniques for working with the Groovy programming language. In this video workshop, presenter and Java consultant Ken Kousen shows you how to create RESTful web services, conduct Unit Tests, apply Groovy's functional programming features, and use Java's Spring Framework in conjunction with Groovy.

Groovy Beginner To Advanced

By Object Computing

This 2-day, comprehensive course covers a lot of material and takes JVM developers from beginner to advanced with the Groovy language by way of comprehensive lecture, demonstration, and hands-on exercises. Developers will leave the experience with all of the skills needed to effectively use the Groovy programming language to build many kinds of JVM applications.

Groovy Metaprogramming

By Object Computing

The course covers, in-depth, how Groovy's dynamic dispatch mechanism works and how application and plugin code can participate with that dispatch mechanism to provide more simple application code. You'll also learn techniques that may be applied at compile time to enhance classes, including AST Transformations, automatically enhancing Grails artifacts with traits and more.