Updates on DSLs In Action - Into Copy Editing

I have completed writing DSLs In Action. As we speak, the book has moved from the development editor to the copy editor. I will be starting the process of copy editing along with the team of helpful copy editors of Manning.

The Table of Contents has been finalized. Have a look at the details and send me your feedbacks regarding the contents of the book.

DSLs In Action is a book for the practitioner. It contains real world experience of writing DSLs in a multitude of JVM languages. As the table of contents show, I have used Java, Groovy, Ruby, Scala and Clojure to demonstrate their power in DSL design and implementation. I have also focused on the integration aspects between these languages, which is fashionably known today by the name of polyglot programming.

All examples in the book are from the real world domain of securities trading and brokerage systems. I have intentionally chosen a specific domain to demonstrate the progression of DSL implementation from small trivial examples to serious complex and non-trivial ones. This also goes to bust a common myth that DSLs are applicable only for toy examples.

Another recurring theme throughout the book has been a strong focus on abstraction design. Designing good DSLs in an exercise in making well-designed abstractions. A DSL is really a thin linguistic abstraction on top of the semantic model of the domain. If the underlying model is expressive enough and publishes well behaved abstractions, then designing a user friendly syntax on top of it becomes easy. The book discusses lots of tools and techniques that will help you think in terms of designing expressive DSLs.

The book is replete with code written in multiple languages. You can get it all by cloning my github repo which contains maven based instructions to try most of them yourself.

And finally, thanks to all the reviewers for the great feedback received so far. They have contributed a lot towards improvement of the book, all remaining mistakes are mine.