Ant: The Definitive Guide

I learned something on page 2 -- ANT stands for Another Neat Tool. I was surprised, I always thought ANT was a pretty dull tool. To be sure, every time I wanted it to do something I could eventually get it to do it. (Actually I went and got help from the guru.) That reached a point where I got handed this book and told to go away. First, of course, I turned to the index, looked up what I wanted to do, went to the proper page and it didn't make any sense at all. Son-of-a-gun! The guru said, "have you read the manual?" Well, not all of it." Go read the manual, start at page one." I did. And the surprising thing was that it didn't take long at all. From the beginning, it made pretty good sense. And as I got further into it I started finding something neat that I should do about every six or ten pages. ANT is a pretty powerful program. The book? It's an O'Reilly book, professionally written for professional programmers, what more can I say. Oh yes, it's a new book, and it covers ANT 1.6. Highly Recommended!

this is a great book for getting your knowledge past the basics in ant, but i don't think it is the best reference. use this book to learn ant and use online help for reference.

Well I'm not writing ANT tasks yet, but doing almost everything else with the help of this concise guide... only thing is the order of the chapters is not in the way it should be traversed (in my opinion).Developers accostomed to using Apache products, java freeware can read thru Ch. 1(jumpstart), skim thru Ch. 3(Buildfile), skim thru Ch. 4 (Ant datatypes) and then dive into ch. 7 (core tasks) where the action is... that is what you'd need to refer to constantly as you write your buildfile... save Ch. 5 (User written tasks) for the last... you probably won't need it unless you're one of those who feel guilty about using a freeware without contributing to it.

Ant: The Definitive Guide is just that - A great tutorial on ANT that will have you up and running with Ant in just a few minutes. I have been an Ant user for about 8 months now, but I still found a lot of very interesting things in this book. The book starts up with an introduction to Ant and builds into a complete tutorial where the reader will learn everything he/she needs to write build scripts using Ant.I really liked the chapters on user written tasks and listeners which allow you to extend Ant to do what you need it to do. The book also includes a detailed section where all of the core and optional tasks are described in details with a usage example for most of the tasks.If you are using Ant or want to start using Ant, this is the book for you.

Woops, I meant to say ANT! Anyways, what a great book. Was worried about being able to use a new build tool until someone recommended this book. I especially liked the more advanced concepts portion. Never would have attempted those on my own! I've experienced fewer bugs since using ANT and I am now creating my software in record time. Thanks guys! Keep me posted on Ants two, the sequel.b. Porter