Preface

When I first came across Gradle in 2011, it was a young yet powerful tool. If I remember correctly, the version was 0.9. It was difficult for me to get started despite Gradle having an adequate official documentation. What I missed the most was a guide that would just help me understand the core concepts first, without having to go through the entire documentation.

Gradle is a fantastic build tool. There is so much to learn about it that new users are often clueless about where to start. It is unwise to expect an application developer to go through the entire Gradle reference material just to understand the basics.

This book attempts to help a reader get started with Gradle by revealing the key concepts in a step-by-step manner. It introduces a more advanced topic succinctly. This book focuses on the practical usage of Gradle that a reader can immediately put to use on his or her project. This book strives to stay true to the spirit of 'essentials' by avoiding going into every possible feature and option that Gradle has to offer. Code samples for applications have been consciously kept very small in order to avoid distractions from application logic.

This book is a quick start guide for Gradle. If you are a Java developer already building your code with Ant or Maven and want to switch to Gradle, this book helps you to quickly understand the different concepts of Gradle. Even if you do not have exposure to other build tools such as Ant or Maven, you can start afresh on Gradle with the help of this book. It starts with the basics of Gradle and then gently moves to concepts such as multimodule projects, migration strategies, testing strategies, Continuous Integration, and code coverage with the help of Gradle.