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So, you want to get up to speed on JBoss Drools, the open source rules engine.

Here's my list of resources, some of them are obvious, some take a bit more digging.

Official Documentation

The official documentation is the obvious starting point, its improved greatly over the years, but there are errors, usually relating to older APIs being used or incorrectly cut and paste code samples.  If it doesn't make sense, search for corroberation

• http://jboss.org/drools/documentation

Mailing list

Join the User mailing list (don't pester the Dev list), even if you don't post, there are questions, and keeping an eye on the posts over time will definiately expand your understanding.

• http://jboss.org/drools/lists

Examples

Drools has a set of examples available as stand alone projects, the examples in the documentation are often incomplete (Rule Templates and Excel Spreadsheets are one weakness) and these examples really help out.  You'll currently find the examples in the downloads area.

• http://jboss.org/drools/downloads

Source code

Get the source code... no, really, go get it, you can't understand some error messages unless you have the code, so providing it to eclipse so you can follow the stack traces.  In addition, the unit tests also provide usage examples, again it's in the downloads area.

• http://jboss.org/drools/downloads

Books

There are two books produced by Packt publishing which cover Drools from different directions.

• For developers: Drools JBoss Rules 5.0 Developer's Guide
• For BA's (quite non technical): JBoss Drools Business Rules

Blogs

There are a couple of blogs about drools, and more one off articles on various aspects of drools.

• Official Drools blog: http://blog.athico.com/
• JBPM5 (Formerly Drools Flow):  http://salaboy.wordpress.com
• Various overviews from the same author
  •  
    • http://technicalmumbojumbo.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/jboss-drools-decision-tables/  
    • http://technicalmumbojumbo.wordpress.com/2009/05/20/jboss-drools-defining-business-rules/ 

Nightly builds

You can access the nightly builds of Drools from their Hudson CI environment.  Since Drools often has a lengthy cycle of Milestones, this can often be useful to use.

• http://hudson.jboss.org/hudson/job/drools/

Stack Overflow

Activity isn't massive, but it is still useful to post questions and answers

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/drools

Webinar

Best practices in overview,  about 80 percent vague, but 20 percent solid information.

• https://decisionmanagement.omnovia.com/archives/64461

Wiki

Somewhat out of date, but still interesting

• http://community.jboss.org/wiki/JBossRules

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