I'm new to G&G. Bought 4 books, Groovy in Action, Grails in Action, Definitive Guide to Grails, and Beginning G&G. I'm a bit perplexed at building a simple web app that connects to our existing Oracle database. I built the example -- http://www.grails.org... in Netbeans, but that uses the built-in hsqldb. I can login & connect to my Oracle database in Netbeans, but spent many hours spinning my wheels (in the Controller and Domain sections) trying to display my database content, much less changing any of the data. Which direction, or book, do most G&G users find helps them accomplish this the fastest?

I'm not really sure what your background is, so please excuse anything that might seem trivial to you, but I'll give it a stab.

From your post, it sounds like you might want to brush up on the MVC pattern for your UI woes. GSP, the default Grails UI technology, follows this UI design pattern very closely. As for your domain woes, you will want to read a bit about GORM (https://www.ibm.com/d..., and hibernate if you're not already familiar with this ORM.

I've been using the "* in Action" books and the Grails Documentation (http://grails.org/Doc...) and tutorials (http://www.grails.org.... If you are new to both Groovy and Grails, as I was, I would suggest you work through at least the first 2/3 of the Groovy in Action book first, try to complete as many exercises as you can. This will give you enough foundation to jump head-first into Grails with some level of confidence.

In addition to following through the Grails in Action book, I found it useful to checkout a lot of other RAD tools while I was learning about the benefits of Grails. I was familiar with the terms Convention Over Configuration, Rapid Application Development, etc but I really had no idea what that looked like until I checked out how Spring Roo, Rails, and Grails actually worked. From a Java EE background I found it easiest to understand SpringRoo first, then got sidetracked with Rails, and ended up meeting somewhere in the middle at Grails.

I think you have the right books. the Grails in Action book will walk you through most, if not all, of the magic of that Netbeans tutorial. I think the point of that thing is to showcase the Groovy/Grails integration of Netbeans; I'll spare you my griping about IDEs. I would suggest becoming familiar with interacting with Grails in the shell, it will help you get a better understanding of what's going on behind the magic in the IDE and what Grails is capable of. This is all in your Groovy/Grails in Action books, but here's a pretty decent walkthrough (https://www.ibm.com/d....

I would also suggest checking out the GrailsPodcast: http://grailspodcast..... They talk about a lot of different concepts in Groovy and Grails; back issues are available on iTunes.

I also have a few Groovy and Grails related repositories opened at Github if you want to checkout some working example code. I've been working on a twitter-like app, like the one presented in Grails in Action, for a little while now, but I think it shows a practical example of how to leverage the Grails RAD tool. (http://github.com/ind...)

I hope that at least some of this helps.

Cheers Mate!