I'll say up front I expected to 'like' the book. Apress does a decent job as a tech publisher, and the "recipes" format is generic enough that it's hard to screw up. That said, I was expecting to give it 3 stars unless it was *really* bad. It's not. It's much better than I expected.

This is probably my new 'favorite' book right because of its utility. As I said, the 'recipe' approach is hard to screw up, but some authors manage to do so anyway. How? By including too much repetitive information that is in online tutorials or manuals, and ignoring the 'real world' use cases that developers face. Bashar's book seems to avoid those issues pretty well.

I've got two modes I use tech books for: 1) when I'm facing a serious problem which I need an immediate answer to, and 2) when I'm just casually browsing to see what new stuff I can surprise myself with. Bashar's book has proved itself useful to me twice in the first 3 weeks of owning it on point 1 (saving me probably 2-3 hours of research/testing/work) and I've enjoyed going through random sections in it in "point 2" mode.

This book belongs on the shelf of any serious Groovy/Grails developer, along with the new The Definitive Guide to Grails, Second Edition (Expert's Voice in Web Development). The DGGv2 is almost a bit overwhelming, and while it's good, I might actually recommend Beginning Groovy and Grails: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional) instead, for people just starting out with Groovy and Grails.