What is Groovy and why should I care?

Hello again, it's me, Adam. Earlier this year, I finished my self-published book, Learning Groovy, which is about, well, learning Groovy. It also covers the top Groovy-based tools and frameworks, Gradle, Grails, Spock, and Ratpack.

I've enjoyed using Leanpub as a place to work on my books (What's new in Java 8 and others). It is really easy and developer friendly. It uses a Dropbox folder and you can write your book in Markdown (which I did). I've enjoyed a fairly constant trickle of purchases, but I was frustrated that I never had enough time to devote to the other huge part of self-publishing: marketing. To be really successful with a book, it needs to be marketed really well. You need to put in a lot of time and money. So, when it came to publishing "Learning Groovy," I approached several publishers to do the marketing for me.

Luckily, one of them accepted, and I'm currently in the process of final edits (publisher shall remain anonymous for now).

This means that you can only get the self-published version of "Learning Groovy" for a limited time. Once it goes to the publisher, I have to take down all my versions per the contract.

"What is Groovy and why should I care?" you ask? First of all, what rock have you been living under? Secondly, Groovy is a mature and flexible open-source language that runs on the JVM. Want to learn more about functional programming, want optional dynamic typing, easy restful services, easy reactive web applications (Ratpack)? Maybe you to learn about the most popular build framework and testing frameworks for Java (Gradle and Spock)? Groovy is where it's at.