Groovy Course coming soon

One of the topics that we've been asked to provide a course on at Virtual Pair Programmers a number of times over the last few years is Groovy... so I'm pleased to announce that I'm currently making good progress on creating the Groovy Course, which I hope will be released around the end of March 2014.

While I've been talking about the Groovy course to fellow Java programmers and trainers, in particular I've had a number of conversations about what it should cover , everyone seems to agree that once you start with Groovy you don't want to switch back to plain old Java, and I guess this is primarily because everything you can do in Java can be done in Groovy, often more quickly, and of course you can do more too. I've come to the conclusion that for many Java programmers it's really quite easy to get up and running in Groovy, but to really harness it's power, and get the most out of the language, it needs a really quite thorough course.

For anyone who doesn't know what Groovy is, I've pasted below a response to the question "what is groovy" taken from Stack Overflow... although this isn't the top answer on that site, it's the one that I like the most as I think it gives a real flavour of what Groovy is really about from a programmer's perspective:

Groovy is a dynamically typed language that runs on the Java platform and includes some features that a lot of people wish were in Java (ex: closures). One nice thing about Groovy is that it reduces the amount of code needed to do common tasks such as parsing XML files and accessing databases. While learning Groovy you can always mix in straight Java code. This is nice since it allows you to ease into Groovy at your own pace while delivering functional code. If you've been using Java for a while I think you'll appreciate the simplicity of using Groovy since you can program more functionality using less keystrokes. The inclusion of closures was a big selling point for me. One word of caution: if you use Groovy for production code you should make sure there is descent test coverage (since Groovy is a dynamic language). Even if you decide not to use Groovy, it's not a huge time investment to learn and experiment a bit.

The chapter list for our forthcoming course isn't quite complete, but the likely structure and outline content is as follows:

• Introduction: The difference between Groovy and Java, installing Groovy and setting up a development environment
• Part One: Getting started - looking at the power of key aspects of programming in Groovy, such as objects, methods, strings, operators, closures, ranges and looping and unit testing
• Part Two: Case Study - using everything we have learned to start to build a working application - our example is going to be a hotel room booking system
• Part Three: Going deeper - more on closures, working with files including XML, databases, Meta Object Protocol, using stubs and mocks in unit testing and finally packaging and deployment

Our case study will start after we have studied the basics, and we'll be developing a back-end system to help a small hotel manage its room bookings. As we learn more advanced topics, we will then enhance the back-end system to provide more functionality. 

We'll put an update on progress nearer the release date, but in the meantime, if you're welcome to contact me through www.virtualpairprogrammers.com