Context

When Packt contacted me to review this book it was fairly natural to me to accept the offer. We are huge fan of Grunt* at Bringr and Redsmin and use it a lot in our everyday workflow.


This book was really quick and easy to read (about a day). While reading it, I discovered that it was primarily written for beginners in mind so I personnally did not learned a lot of new things but that's fine since it will be a great book for them.

[Review #grunt] Received it yesterday, was (too) easy to read (junior js dev level), review is on its way! pic.twitter.com/5jRflWgNnZ
— François-G. Ribreau (@FGRibreau) April 27, 2014

Review

Getting Started with Grunt is the perfect book for anyone who wants to improve their workflow with Grunt while building JavaScript applications.

With only 112 pages the book is really short and easy to read, it took me about one day to read it all. It was written for javascript beginners but contains however some tips for advanced developers.

Chapters are written gradually, from building your directory setup to writing your first Gruntfile followed by an introduction on how to write multi and asynchronous grunt tasks.

Broader subjects are explored like: why you would want to use static analysis tools like JSLint or JsHint in your project; what are NodeJS and NPM; how NPM dependencies management works; what is transcompilation and how to configure grunt to transcompile CoffeeScript, Jade and Stylus files; etc.…

I would recommend this book to anyone who doesn't know very much about Grunt, or anyone who just wants a reference for it.


* we are planning to move on Gulp.