Hi Marcel,
I think there's something to be said for the trial-and-error approach, to me it's more interesting and appropriate than book-learning. But you can only get so far like that, so yes, a combination is useful.
There are two aspects to the task here. 1) Learning enough groovy to be dangerous, and 2) Learning the jira API.
Learning enough groovy is the easier part, particularly if you have some familiarity with java, or even perl/python etc. There are quite a few good groovy tutorials, but do the examples in the groovy shell as you go, and change them etc. Even if you're not writing fantastically idiomatic groovy code, I think it's OK to learn "just enough", then over time you can keep coming back and learn say groovy-sql, xml builders and parsers, MOP, and so on.
OK so the hard part is learning what you need from the jira api, which is equally hard whatever language you're using. Get hold of Intellij IDEA... afaik the free edition is fine for this purpose. I wrote up how to set this up with jira a while ago, but I think it's still mostly valid. To me anyway, having intellisense and ctrl-q to view the javadoc is invaluable.
Download the jira source and open the pom file in IDEA. Then if you need to know how to do something, you can normally find it in the source. Start with the url name, eg ConfigureAppLinks, find that string in actions.xml, then open the class. Oh, and learn a few of the keyboard shortcuts in IDEA.
I have a groovy file in my project called Scratch,groovy, probably several times a day I'm hacking in that then running it in the script runner admin panel. Once I know how to do something, eg add a new applink or writing a groovy condition of some kind, then I will take that code and put it in the plugin I'm working on.
And finally, this is true of all languages, but imho, once you've got the basics from a book, pick a task and write it in the language. It should be easy to think of a task. For instance, years ago, I could see the pain my support team were having in setting up a project the same as an existing one, so I wrote the copy project plugin (now incorporated in script runner). I'm not at all proud of that code, but the point is it forced me to learn large parts of the API, eg around custom fields, schemes, role and user management and so on. Even though that was about 5 years ago, I still refer back to that code from time to time to see how to do something.
And also, feel free to ask questions on this forum. Most of the problems that people post on the script runner plugin pages are actually problems doing something with the API and not with groovy, so the questions are totally valid for AAC.
Good luck!
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