Gradle Beyond the Basics

Afterword

If you’ve read through this short book and coded along with the examples, you’ve got a solid grounding in many of the topics you’ll need as a Gradle power user. There is always more to learn, but understanding Gradle’s philosophy of file operations, its amazing plugin API, its build metaprogramming model, and its dependency management scheme will get you most of the way you need to writing the intelligent custom builds the future calls for.

To develop a custom build is to develop custom software. It is not merely to cobble scripts together as a second-class activity, subservient to the “real” software that drives the business domain. If you are using the techniques you’ve learned here, you are coding in the highly specialized domain of your build. That body of software you create supports every other line of code your team writes.

It is my hope that the material in this book moves you closer to mastering Gradle, using this build tool to add more and more value to your software delivery pipeline as your team’s build and deployment practices continue to evolve. This process is important, and so your continued education in Gradle is important. I’m pleased to have offered another small contribution to this end.