Packt Publishing has sent me a copy of this starter book that introduces the world of Drools. The book is titled Drools Starter and it is written by Jeremy Ary.
The technical reviewer of the book is Edson Tirelli, Project Lead of the Drools project at Red Hat. So this means that Edson surely adds a major grade of notoriety and reliability for this book.
Drools is the Business Rule Management System (BRMS) provided by the JBoss Community for implementing complex applications with automatic behaviors based on rules. The framework is essentially based on an extension of the Rete pattern-matching algorithm.
The main goal of the book is to give a quick overview about how to start developing with Drools covering just some basic notions needed for create your first project.
The book starts with an introduction about what Drools does and it explains when you should approach to it for implementing your applications. The first section of the book is dedicated to explain how to install your development environment: JDK, Maven, Eclipse and so on.
The example project provided with the book is very simple and I think that is a very good sample for understanding the basics of the framework. The author discusses how to create your own Drools project using the Eclipse plugin and changing the default settings using Maven.
Then it approaches for talking about rules and facts and here we have the first implementation that shows the capabilities of this rule engine.
The book is well written and contains all the basic notions about the world of Drools but it can be considered the missing link of the Drools documentation.
I have also appreciated all the references at the end of the book where developers can find not only the JBoss Community reference but also some Community guys that are sharing some good articles in their own blogs.
One of the most big problems of all the literature about Drools (books and documentation) is that it is not easy to approach to it for the first time, but with this starter book, all the basics notions are explained in a quick and an understandable way.
I would like to thank Packt Publishing for providing me a digital copy of the book.