May your builds always succeeds!
Just finished the book “Building and Testing with Gradle” in this vacation, and here is my review.
First of all this book has a great Foreword by Ken Sipe, the CTO of Gradleware. I totally agree with him on
What I have discovered over the years as a software engineer is that in order to solve a problem best, I have to understand the model. The reason make wasn’t a great build tool for Java is that it didn’t have a way to express the model well. Ant gave us platform independence and a better vocabulary, but a weak model. Maven provided a stronger model, which is why so many people prefer it over Ant. The challenge for Maven is that it provided a “the one model to rule them all”. You’re able to express your build needs within that model and only that model.
Gradle fills the gap. Gradle provides a way of modeling a build system using a DSL with convention over configuration, yet allowing an enterprise to define its own model. It goes deeper than this, as explained in this introductory book by Matthew and Tim, but modeling by convention is truly a game changer for enterprise software development.
To simplify, Make has no build model, Ant has weak model, Maven has one (and only one) strong model, and Gradle allows you do define model. I’m not saying Gradle is better than Maven, actually I think in most cases, one strong model is better than allowing people define models. But the ‘model’ concept is the key to undertand the differences among those tools.
BTW, the title of this post if borrowed from Ken’s foreword 
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This is one of the shortest technique book I’ve ever read, only 110 pages composed by 6 chapters:
- Hello, Gradle!
- Gradle Tasks
- Ant and Gradle
- Maven and Gradle
- Testing with Gradle
- Multiproject Builds
Just like any tool introduction book, the first chapter is for the very beginners. The ‘Gradle Tasks’ chapter is the most valuable part of this book, it does a good job explaining this key concept, and in a practical way. The third chapter is for Ant users the fourth is for Maven users, I belong to the latter. From the ‘Maven and Gradle’ chapter I can see the Gradle implementations of Maven concepts like coordinate, dependency, repository, and convention, but a bit disappointed on the missing of lifecycle. The ‘Testing with Gradle’ has little value, it’s just too basic. The last chapter is on multi-project builds, or sometimes we call this multi-module builds. Any real project is multi-moduled so I could not skip it. This chapters introduces 3 ways to organize your modules, one build file for each module, one master build file for all modules, and in a hybrid way which some modules have build file while somes don’t. This is interesting to me because Maven only gives me one choice. But, when I looked forward to see some advice on when to use which style, the authors told me to decide by myself 
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Too short the book is so sometimes I have to refer to the official gradle user guide to understand something. The authors mentioned that there will be future volumes for Gradle plugin ecosystem and Java plugin, besides, I also hope there will be something on Gradle’s lifecycle, and more importantly, real world examples and best practices. This is the only published Gradle book and Gradle itself is only on version 1.0-milestone-3, so there is a lot of space to improve.
Thanks to Tim Berglund & Matthew McCullough for making this book out.
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