Rating: 
Summary: Good but needs some more explanation
Review: I have been reading this book for a couple of weeks and have found it very helpful in my journey towards understanding Java Development. There are lots of examples and the book is generally very readable.
I do have a critiscism though. The book in some area's could have done with a little bit more detail in its description of some of the tasks provided by ANT. For example in it's covering of the <apply> task the use of the <mapper>, <srcfile/> and <targetfile/> tasks within the context of the <apply> task was only 2 sentences. Although the authors had covered <mapper> in a previous chapter they could have discussed them a little bit more in the context of thier use within the <apply> task. I had to sit down and work out how to use them rather than relying on a clear explanation by the book.
All in all though I have found this book helpful and I now feel as if I understand ANT quite well.
Rating: 
Summary: Its the best book on Ant, and the only one for Ant1.5
Review: I like this book, but having written half of it with Erik you have to view me as slightly biased :)Being an Ant developer, and having written or edited a lot of the Ant docs (like Ant in Anger), we didn't want to duplicate what you can get for free with the product. Instead we set out to explain Ant to new users, in eight chapters that goes from introduction to deployment. Then we have some real fun, ten chapters on how to solve problems and build things in ant, from web applications and EJB projects, to Web Services, and JNI libraries. Along the way we cover how to manage big projects, XML files, XDoclet based generation of code and data, testing, all the things you need in a big software project. Then we get round to production side deployment, and how to use Ant there. Finally, we dedicate two chapters to extending ant through tasks, listeners and loggers, filters, and selectors. The latter are new to Ant1.5, if you haven't heard of them before. We finish off with some appendices: installing ant (and troubleshooting that), XML primer, IDE integration, style guide and Task reference. The latter, Appendix E, is now included as a PDF with the Ant distributions. We wrote this book with Ant1.5; changing the source to fix bugs we found, changing the book as Ant1.5 evolved. We finished the book the day Ant1.5 came out, so we are confident that what is in there is accurate and up to date. Overall, the book supplements the ant manual with an introduction to Ant, followed by thorough details on how to use Ant in big hard software projects. Ant can do the latter, but it isn't always obvious or easy: we have suffered so you don't have to. I hope you enjoy it! -Steve
Rating:
Summary: Great for Ant AND great for other obscure utilities
Review: I never would have known about such time savers as Middlegen if I hadn't read this book. It has better documentation on some of these other utilities than do the utilities themselves. For example, read this book instead of the CruiseControl documentation, if you need CruiseControl on your project. It's also very well-written and organized, with just the right amount of examples - no tedious 10-page listings. Much better than the O'Reilly lizard book. What's up with the lizard anyway? They had a ready-made animal cover in Ant, and they ignored it.
Rating:
Summary: good book, a little lite on reference material
Review: I really enjoyed reading this book for learning Ant. It covered everything I needed to get up to speed quickly. However, I was a little disappointed in the reference material that I was hoping to use for everyday type stuff. Overall a good book.
Rating:
Summary: good book, a little lite on reference material
Review: I really enjoyed reading this book for learning Ant. It covered everything I needed to get up to speed quickly. However, I was a little disappointed in the reference material that I was hoping to use for everyday type stuff. Overall a good book.
Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected, but still an excellent text
Review: I was expecting an in-depth coverage of all the built-in Ant tasks (e.g., javac) as well as the fine points of filesets, patternsets, etc. I was disappointed to find that this text doesn't cover these in much more detail than the standard Ant documentation. However, its coverage of using Ant with JUnit, CVS and ftp has been tremendously helpful in my current project, and I've referred to it many times since receiving it.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Review: I was new to ANT before purchasing this book. It is easy to follow and has good examples that go along well with the descriptions of each section. I found the author did an excellent job of explaining the details of programming with ANT scripts. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Wow
Review: I'm planning on extending ANT to do specialized testing, so I intend to write custom tasks. I've learned more about ANT's internals reading 4 PAGES (467-470), than I did reading the two CHAPTERS in ANT: The Definitive Guide. I think this book is the real deal - what's up with O'Reilly ? They've been producing some real DOG books recently.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Book
Review: I've had used Ant for a while on small things but was starting a large project conversion with it and needed better info. I find the Ant online docs lacking in good overview and how to use information. This book is great. Even for people who don't normally think they need a book beyond the manual, this one is a fantastic reference. The sections on how to best use it in practice are invaluable. I had started the conversion before reading the book and threw away all the build.xml files I had written and started over based on their advise. The build system is now top notch.
Much, much better than the "reprinted on-line manual" of Ant: A Definitive Guide.
Rating: 
Summary: Nice if you already know ant -
Review: If you've been using ant for several years and need a reference, this may be the book for you. However, if you are relativly new to ant, this book will be more confussing than helpful.
Having said that, there still are some helpful things in this book and very nice ways to integrate ant with junit (which I didn't know I could do) middlegen and other utils. You might buy this book for reference, but If you are just trying to learn - Stick with the free docs. They seem easier than this book
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