Preface

The essence of workflow automation is an exemplification of at least two of the three great virtues of a programmer.

	There are three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
	--–LarryWall, Programming Perl (1st edition), Oreilly And Associates

Larry Wall went on to explain that laziness is the quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. Grunt provides task automation to relieve the developer of the mundane, repetitive processes that occur during software development. Expending effort up front with Grunt will pay dividends in reduction of energy expenditure in the development lifecycle. Impatience, Larry Wall said, makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs but actually anticipate them. Grunt automation can react to your needs by responding to events, such as file changing. With the right combination of tasks and configurations, Grunt automation can even seem as if it is anticipating your next step. Learning Grunt aims to provide you with a ramp from getting up and running to developing your own Grunt plugin. If you are at all lazy and impatient, in the context of a virtuous programmer, then Learning Grunt has been written just for you.