What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with Gradle, discusses briefly about the build automation system, its needs, and how Gradle can help developers to automate the build and deployment process. Along with the Gradle installation, configuration, and features, this chapter also talks about some important concepts such as the initialization script, the Gradle GUI interface, and the Gradle command-line options.

Chapter 2, Groovy Essentials for Gradle, talks about the fundamental concepts of Groovy programming language. This chapter also discusses the classes, beans, and collection frameworks. This chapter gives the reader a heads up on Groovy, which is required for Gradle.

Chapter 3, Managing Task, discusses Tasks in detail, which is the basic unit of action in Gradle. Developers learn about different flavors of Tasks such as in-built tasks and custom tasks. This chapter also discusses task configurations, task ordering, and task dependencies.

Chapter 4, Plugin Management, talks about one of the important building blocks of Gradle, plugins. The reader will learn to create simple plugins and custom plugins. Also, the user will be able to configure plugins as per his/her needs. This chapter also discusses one of the most usable plugins, the Java plugin, in detail. The user will learn about different conventions supported and how to customize the standard conventions as per the project's/organization's requirements.

Chapter 5, Dependency Management, discusses one of the other important features of Gradle, dependency management, in detail. It discusses the dependency resolution, dependency configuration, and dependency customization. It also discusses repository management. It provides a deep insight of how the user can configure different external repositories, internal repositories, as well as use the local filesystem as a repository.

Chapter 6, Working with Gradle, discusses two additional plugins, War and Scala. It also discusses various topics such as property management, multi-project build, and the logging features. The user will learn about different I/O operations, as well as unit testing features using JUnit and TestNG in Gradle.

Chapter 7, Continuous Integration, talks about the continuous integration concepts and tools such as Jenkins and TeamCity, and their integration with Gradle. It also discusses different code quality plugin (Checkstyle, PMD, and Sonar) integrations with Gradle.

Chapter 8, Migration, fulfills one of the critical requirements of users who are already using other build tools such as Ant or Maven and want to migrate to Gradle. It talks about different migration strategies to convert the existing Ant and Maven scripts to Gradle.

Chapter 9, Deployment, explains the deployment aspect of software engineering. How smoothly the user can automate the deployment process, which saves lots of developer as well as operation team time and efforts. It discusses container-based deployment automation processes and tools; Docker. It gives details about Docker installation, useful Docker commands, and how to integrate Docker with continuous integration tools and Gradle to create a build-deploy-test workflow.

Chapter 10, Building Android Applications with Gradle, talks about mobile application development and deployment. Gradle is an official build tool for Android. This chapter focuses on sample Android application development and different deployment strategies such as deploying the debug version, the release version, deployment on different configurations, and so on.