Manning eBooks
Disclaimer: I've grown up a bit and learned a lot since this blog was started. In the beginning I took tips from the likes of John Chow and Shoemoney and tried to write titles and content for Digg and Reddit. In the end it didn't do me much good and most of it just seems silly looking back. If you're interested anyway, here's what I wrote back then, but take it with a grain of salt.
Last week at the Emerging Tech Conference I dropped my card in the fishbowl at the Manning Publications table to win a free eBook. Turns out I actually won! This morning in my e-mail I found a free eBook copy of Groovy in Action. I haven’t read any of it yet, but I would like to thank Manning for the book, and I will definitely write up a review when I’ve had some time to read though it.
Until then, if you’re interested, Groovy is a scripting language that runs in the Java Virtual Machine. Until the Emerging Tech Conference I really was not all that interested in Groovy, but then I saw a presentation on Grails, a Ruby-on-Rails like application framework that uses Groovy instead of Ruby. The neat thing about Grails is that it’s really just a wrapper around a Spring Framework back-end, including a Hibernate-based persistence layer. I still need a chance to play with the whole stack, but it’s definitely on my list of things to do because it offers a lot of the neat things about RoR without learning an entirely new language and set of libraries. So far the only downfall I see is that like RoR, Grails really doesn’t run on a shared (read cheap) hosting setup, so if you want to put a Grails app into production you probably need a Java App Server, which typically costs quite a bit more the PHP hosting.