I work a lot with gradle and had the same problems in the beginning. I overcome most problems by extending gradle through custom plugins and reading a lot of co

I work a lot with gradle and had the same problems in the beginning. I overcome most problems by extending gradle through custom plugins and reading a lot of code. The documentation became clearer and clearer. Granted that is obviously not the desired way of learning a tool. Whenever I talk about Gradle and what it’s biggest problems are it’s exactly that. The introduction docs glance over so many aspects. It gets worse if you are completely new to groovy, Java and gradle. The idea to hide everything behind conventions is smart to keep the amount of configuration low. But if one has no idea about these conventions it becomes insanely hard to figure out how this black box works. One thing I have to disagree is the way he describes how to create tasks and that there are multiple ways of doing it. What he shows is the internal gradle API mainly targeted for plugin authors or gradle itself. There is no barrier. Build script authors should stay away from these APIs to stay forwards compatible with future versions. That’s also why gradle has 3 types of documentation: DSL, API and the raw Java Docs. Again nothing that makes the Tool easier to use for beginners.