Building and Testing with Gradle - Short Review

When I picked up this very slim tome I knew nearly nothing about Gradle. Over the hundred odd well written pages of Building and Testing with Gradle I learned enough to understand the basic how, when and whys of the tool.

The book itself covered basic Gradle usage, how it compares to existing tools like maven, how to use ant and your existing ant task toolbox from within it and a basic look at how to write a custom task and integrate your own testing. From a beginners perspective the code samples and explanations made sense (although from these snippets I find Groovy an ugly language) and were mostly small and focused enough to read on a busy train.

The ideal readers are people who are very unfamiliar with this tool and who are looking for a working introduction to the how and why that they can absorb in a single quick sitting. I don’t think the book would have much value once you move beyond this level of understanding and are able to put the online docs in to context but for my need it was fine.

Clear, well written and covered the essentials but probably a one off read. 7/10.