Review of "Getting Started with Grunt" eBook

So I recently read Getting Started with Grunt: The JavaScript Task Runner which I think lives up to it’s title very well.  If you have any experience with Grunt much of the first few chapters will be super basic for you.  The order of how information was presented I felt could have been better because through many of the chapters the same items seemed to keep showing up such as using grunt for minification.  This repetition is very useful though when getting started with something new as to really drive the point home and reads the same as pretty much every other tech book written, ever.

The really awesome takeaways from this book are a much and section I would highlight. Writing customs tasks and multitasks, basics of node packages/plugins. Improving workflow and Adding arguments to commands via bash which is very useful for setting up different environments. This book also has a big listing of all the plugins you’ll want to use for all of the standard thing such as minification, local server, livereload, watch, etc.  If you are new to any of those things they will be covered in depth as they are so vital to a front-end workflow.

The advanced section covers publishing one’s own grunt plugin and introduces how to set up continuous integration and unit testing. These just lightly skim the surface to show there is so much more that can be done with grunt than what is covered in this primer. However the section on publishing a grunt plugin via NPM is fully covered.

Overall I would say this is a great book for someone who has never used grunt before and even for someone who has a good working knowledge of grunt it’s very skim able for some new ways of approaching problems or some ways to customize you commands further by adding command line variables and building multitasks to further improve your grunt workflow.