Grails in Action -- Initial thoughts

I've been working through Manning's excellent Grails in Action book to strengthen my skills in Grails. I've been away from heavy duty programming for a while, maintaining poorly made sites in Drupal has made my development skills rusty. So far (partway through Chapter 2), I'm happy with the results.

I like this book so much for a few reasons.

1. Good humor. The Quote Of The Day application in chapter 1 starts it off right, and sprinkled references to Chuck Norris keep the material fresh
2. You build a really cool app -- I'm not all the way through yet, but it looks like Hubbub is essentially Twitter built on Grails. Not a Twitter client. Twitter itself. That's a pretty sweet app to build as a learning tool.
3. Development the right way -- I've been learning about modern practices in web development like Test-Driven Development for a little while...yet when it comes to building new software, I often find myself falling back into my usual patterns of "just code and see what happens", sprinkling System.out.println() everywhere. I hypothesize that this is because this is the way I learned to code, in high school and in college. Old habits are hard to break. This book promises to devote proper time to testing in Chapter 7, which at first seems a little late. But then even in the chapter 2, domain modeling, it has you write integration tests for your domain classes right after you write them.

As I continue to work through the book, I'll reflect on my thoughts.