A key consideration when writing a plugin is aesthetics and readability. The DSL must read like a description,not appear to be someone writing a Groovy or a Kotlin program. This leads to easier adoption of both the plugin and Gradle in general as a build tool. This form of expressiveness sometimes referred to a being `gradlesque`, is key to producing a good plugin. All of the idioms in this book are presented in Groovy. Although it is possible to write plugins in Kotlin or Java, these recipes still focus on Groovy as it provides the easiest and most readable medium for implementing plugins. The book also assumes a minimum Gradle version of 3.0 and that the reader can program in Groovy. All examples in the book have been tested with all major Gradle releases from 3.0 through to the latest 4 .x release.

The learning curve for the native software model was not an easy slope for plugin authors. Even though that approach has now been abandoned by the folks from Gradle Inc. as a stragegy for future Gradle releases, this book contains four recipes that are intended to those that still have plugins partly based upon the native software model.