About this Book
I assume you are a developer and are at least comfortable with Java.[18] You don’t have to be an expert, but any discussions of the basics of object-oriented programming are beyond the scope of this book.
18 That unfortunate burst of blatant honesty just cut my potential audience by far too many. If you’re buying the book just to have it look cool on your bookshelf, or to build a book fort, or to prop open your office door, or to hold down stacks of new cover sheets for your T.P.S. reports, or for any other reason that doesn’t involve actually reading it, please feel free to do so. By the way, you can get your own T.P.S. report cover sheets at http://www.chrisglass.com/journal/downloads/TPSreport.pdf, among other places.
I do not, however, assume that you have experience with Groovy. The Groovy concepts are covered where they are used, and because I wanted the chapters to be as independent as possible, that means some redundancy is involved. The question of how to teach Groovy bothered me for some time, because I knew that some people prefer the traditional, feature-by-feature tutorial, whereas others much prefer small but nontrivial examples. In the end, I solved the problem by doing both. Chapter 2 is entitled “Groovy by example,” and appendix B is called “Groovy by feature.” Hopefully one or the other or both will provide you with what you need.[19]