Jolt Finalist: Automate With Grunt
by Brian Hogan
Given enough time, every language develops its own build utility. C and C++ have the many make variants. Java has Ant and Maven, Groovy has Gant, Ruby has Rake, and so on. While in theory, one tool could be used across multiple languages, the reality is that each language's ecosystem has different conventions and different ways of delivering the final distributable executable package.
Now that JavaScript is both a client and server solution, it needs a sophisticated build tool as well. While there are several products that have tried to address this need, the leading one is surely Grunt. Grunt performs many of the JS-specific tasks you'd encounter in normal Web app production: linting, minification, testing, and so on. In addition, Grunt has a growing ecosystem of plugins that help to integrate it into modern toolchains.
What Grunt has lacked is a useful manual with documentation of not only common tasks, but common build situations. This book, published by the Pragmatic Programmers, is precisely that guide. It's a practical guide to building applications in JavaScript, a manual for Grunt, and a reference that provides recipe-like solutions. Explanations of how to work with plugins and tutorials on how to write your own task templates complete this intensely hands-on book. In addition, it's well written. It is, in sum, precisely the book you wish you had for each of the major tools you use in software development.
In discussing this book, one of the Jolt Award judges lamented that there were not more inexpensive, single-topic, hands-on manuals that give you all you need to know in a direct and approachable style. This observation is spot on in this era of carelessly written manuals and defective documentation. However, Automate With Grunt is one of the few manuals that amply fulfills this simple mission. If you write apps primarily with JavaScript, this is the book to get and keep within reach.
— Andrew Binstock
