Modern web broswers are becoming the platform of choice online. Apps come and go, but websites seem to be the beginning, middle and end. To this end, it has become increasingly complicated to maintain a large number of build tasks all in one place. Thankfully, there are tools to aid this.

Recently, I’ve started to use Grunt – a Javascript task runner along with a large number of plugins. I have posted two introduction blog articles on Grunt, over at the Branded3’s blog.

Using Grunt to automate development tasks Part I

Using Grunt to automate development tasks Part II

Packt Publishing got in touch off the back of these posts to offer me the chance to read through their new book – “Getting Started with Grunt: The JavaScript Task Runner”.

Setting up and running Grunt is fairly straight forward, even for beginners (as per my posts), however, it’s always a good idea to make sure you understand what the underlying technology is, and what it can do for you.

This book is a great introduction to Grunt, and also to the Node.js system that underpins it. As well as being a reference, there are also a large number of great walkthrough examples, and real-world scenarios. The concepts are covered in great details, and the book also covers deployment strategies to a number of platforms.

If you want to take a look at the book, you can download a sample chapter over at gswg.io – direct link: http://gswg.io/files/9781783980628_Chapter_01.pdf

In the 112 pages, it gives a great introduction and overview from beginner to intermediate. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone looking at taking up Grunt, without hacking straight in to it.