Up and Running Groovy: An O’Reilly screencast for my Manning book (wait, what?)

Way back in the Spring of 2009, I was contacted by an editor at O’Reilly about doing a couple of “targeted video/screencasts”. This person (who is no longer there — I’d give you his name but I haven’t asked his permission yet) had the idea of getting people together in an informal setting and talking about state of the art technologies.

To make a long story short (it’ll get longer later), I wound up flying to Sebastopol, CA in late April, 2009, and we recorded two extended screencasts at the Westerbeke Ranch Conference and Event Center in the heart of Sonoma Valley wine country. We were the only people there, so it was pretty quiet. It also hadn’t yet warmed up, so we were on the chilly side, but that wasn’t a problem either. Oh, and the wine was good, too.

The format of the screencasts was a conversation between me and a single developer, shifting between us and the laptop I was using (a Sony VAIO, with a Camtasia install that almost brought it to its knees).

One of those screencasts, on Enterprise Java, has mercifully been lost to the mists of time. The other now has the title “Up and Running Groovy“, and much to my surprise was released to Safari online today. You can find it at http://my.safaribooksonline.com/video/-/9781449323387.

The code holds up surprisingly well, even after 2 1/2 years. The funniest part, though, is that the second slide mentions the upcoming O’Reilly book “Making Java Groovy“, co-authored by Scott Davis (!) and me.

Um, yeah. The book did start out with Scott, and in late 2009 he signed it over to me. In early 2010, O’Reilly cancelled it, along with many others, citing a lack of demand for Groovy. The people at Manning saw the world differently, and now you can get over half of it through the Manning Early Access Program at http://manning.com/kousen.

So here we are, years later, with the odd situation of an O’Reilly screencast that is effectively marketing a Manning book. I don’t think I could make this stuff up.

If you actually watch it and have any questions, please feel free to send them along. I assure you all questions or comments I’m getting these days are changing how I’m writing my book.