Manning Publications recently published "Making Java Groovy" by Ken Kouson so I went and bought it. I often buy books about topics I'm interested in and read them on the train to work to find out if the described technologies can help me with my current or future projects. I really like Manning books because they are usually a good mixture between tutorial/reference and just good introduction into technologies. Working in an almost Java-only environment have been interested in Groovy for quite some time. Most Java developers know the problem: You have all kinds of libraries or at least code snippets that already capture your business logic. But if you want to run a quick script to make use of it, you either have to create a full blown Java app with all it's draw-backs, or go for some other scripting language that can do the trick with as little code as possible; for my quick-and-dirty scripts I usually resorted to one of bash, PHP or Perl. For more complicated tasks I bit the bullet I wrote Java app, bundled into one big jar with a myriad of command line parameters to be able to switch environment, figure out best settings and what not.
