Introduction

This chapter is all about what makes Groovy a very productive and fun programming language.

Groovy popularity builds on certain features of the language that are simply done right, such as closures or builders and are particularly appealing for Java programmers.

The recipes found in this chapter show the different facets of the Groovy language that allows to write a more terse, readable, and less ceremonious code in comparison to Java.

In this chapter, the reader will find—among others—recipes about the incredibly productive Groovy-enhanced collection framework, closures, builders, and the fancy annotations that makes code shorter and to the point.

For the most geeks among the readers, we have also added some recipes about advanced language features such as regular expressions, mixins, and extension methods.