Ant the Definitive Guide

Web research on Ant revealed a lot of explanations, but they were very hard to understand. And I didn't want to waste time scratching my head. This book explained what Ant is and how it works in an approachable way without insulting my intelligence. The author obviously has a lot of experience in Ant and many of the other technologies it interacts with. While other comments have pointed out that it's not a reference, I can easily get those other details on the internet. This book got me up and running with Ant quickly and painlessly. It contained useful examples that actually worked when I tried to follow them.

Apache Ant is the primary build tool for Java projects and this book is excellent introduction to it. Although the title is misleading - this is not really a definitive guide (its not really reference book for starters), it is well written and easily understood. If you work through this book from start to finish then I'm confident that you'll come out the other end as an Ant expert.

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!

I repeat: Buy this book. End of review. Just kidding. About the latter, not the former. Why should you buy this book? Well, to be brutally honest, the online documentation sucks. I'm sorry, but it does. Look, I love and appreciate everything the Apache Jakarta Project gives us - for free! - but all of their projects have one thing in common: a dearth of documentation. I can understand the reason for this - programming is more fun than writing doc. But I don't agree with it. Especially when one frequently wastes hours on even the simplest of tasks due to incomplete or inaccurate documentation. In Ant's case I found direct contradictory information between the online documentation and comments in the sample build files - which we all use to get started. And it wasn't about some minor, deeply buried nuance; it was a major, in-your-face, important point. (Sorry, I can't remember exactly what it was. But I do remember just shaking my head in disbelief - it was that major and that bad.) Ant has evolved into a complex tool. The sample build files are nice, but neither they nor the online doc *explain* how things work, which means you really don't have a good gut feeling about what you are doing when it comes time to expand their functionality. Enter this book. It is clear, comprehensive and well-written. But here is what I really like about it: You need only read the first few chapters to get the overall gist of how Ant works, then you can go directly to subsequent chapters only if and when you need specific information, for example, getting source code from CVS, executing external programs, integrating with Eclpse, etc. This is a refreshing (and needed) change in today's world of 900+ page books that only make you realize that there is waaay too much information for you to absorb on a subject - especially since you are no doubt already overworked, overstressed and behind schedule.

With a number of the books I review, there's there assumption that the reader knows and uses Ant to build the projects and run the program. Since I don't know Ant, I got a copy of Ant - The Definitive Guide (2nd Edition) by Steve Holzner (O'Reilly). This should fill my knowledge gap nicely... Chapter List: Getting Started; Using Properties and Types; Building Java Code; Deploying Builds; Testing Builds with JUnit; Getting Source Code from CVS Repositories; Executing External Programs; Developing for the Web; XML and XDoclet; Optional Tasks; Integrating Ant with Eclipse; Extending Ant; Index Most of the Definite Guide books are light on hand-holding and heavy on covering all the aspects of the subject being discussed. This guide also dives right in, but there's enough coverage of the basics to allow a newbie such as myself to actually understand the basic structure of an Ant file and get started. That basic information is quickly built on, and in little time you're able to do most of the tasks you'll ever encounter for an Ant build. I was always a little intimidated when I'd see Ant examples in other books, but now I have the tools I need to understand and use it. I was also a little surprised (and highly pleased) to see how well Ant integrates with Eclipse. Rather than just sitting down in front of Notepad, you can take advantage of all the niceties of the Eclipse IDE in order to get an accurate and syntactically correct Ant file in short order. Being able to run the Ant file from within Eclipse is also pretty cool. This is another one of those books that will be under close watch at my desk to make sure it doesn't get "borrowed". This book will end up becoming a best friend in short order...