Rating: 
Summary: Next to my desk -- and it's going to STAY there!
Review: People keep borrowing this book. I have to hunt them down all the time because it never comes back! I am an engineer in a large Enterprise Software company that uses Ant for many different and difficult tasks. Erik and Steve have written a book that covers the main gist of Ant, but then they goes deep and really explain well how to do some of the more esoteric and difficult tasks that are not apparent to even many seasoned Ant users.I especially enjoy the sections dealing with Best Practices and handling large projects. I bought a chain to keep this book on my desk, and if you purchase this book (and you should) I would advise that you do the same!
Rating:
Summary: Next to my desk -- and it's going to STAY there!
Review: People keep borrowing this book. I have to hunt them down all the time because it never comes back! I am an engineer in a large Enterprise Software company that uses Ant for many different and difficult tasks. Erik and Steve have written a book that covers the main gist of Ant, but then they goes deep and really explain well how to do some of the more esoteric and difficult tasks that are not apparent to even many seasoned Ant users. I especially enjoy the sections dealing with Best Practices and handling large projects. I bought a chain to keep this book on my desk, and if you purchase this book (and you should) I would advise that you do the same!
Rating: 
Summary: Far-ranging book covers a bit of everything
Review: The developers of Ant exude an energy similar to avid Perl users, a belief in one tool that can do anything and everything. Ant is an integration tool that supports building and testing Java code, and deploying web applications, all through the use of XML-driven scripts. On the way to discussing those topics, the authors cover quite a lot more territory. A few other web-development tools that work well with Ant are described, as are some best practices towards good code design and good maintenance and testing techniques. And life-giving Ant is in the middle of all of it! Actually I suppose that's a good thing, but I'd rather be led there and given something to understand, not just given a set of XML tags to plug in and prosper with. It seems a bit wild to focus on such a subtle point in such a well-received book, but more and more my job is getting to reduced to mastering the grammar of yet another DTD, and it sucks the fun out of what I'm doing. What I like about the short books on make is that there are things left to the reader to work out for himself, and that leads to a better understanding of the tool. Here we have a guide that seems to leave nothing to the imagination; perfect for drones. I'd prefer it if the authors spent a little more time elaborating on the standard Ant documentation; it could use some highlighting here and there. It's informative on the dry side, but judging by other comments that's what everyone wanted from this book.
Rating:
Summary: No better ANT book
Review: This book is one of the best reference guides that I have on my shelf. In fact, I got so tired of dragging it to and from work that I just picked up a used copy for home. With the coming of 1.6 it might seem that this book will become less useful, but in many places the book has already prepared the user for this next upgrade.
Using the information in this book I now use ANT to update my web pages - pulling the latest from my own CVS setup - and use it to do all of my Java compiling (although I still develop in Eclipse). Still, another edition with the 1.6 changes would be nice.
Rating:
Summary: The best Ant book available
Review: This is by far the best Ant book on the market. The authors know Ant inside and out and are able to explain it's use. Notice I said "it's use". Unlike some other Ant books this one doesn't spend most of its time telling you how to write an Ant task (something few people need to do) but instead concentrates on using Ant to solve software build problems.
Recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Great, broad coverage. Well researched. Easy to read.
Review: This should be required reading for all Java developers. Java Development with Ant shows how to automate most of the drudgery involved with large Java projects. The authors included a lot of great examples and practical advice covering the essentials of Ant, building, testing, and running code. Despite its size, the book is not full of endless code listings or mundane command references, which are available for Ant elsewhere anyway. They do include a brief (60 page) appendix which is useful when you are reading away from your computer. The first two chapters are great for a new Ant user. I had used other people's build files before reading this book, but had never created my own before. The first chapter told me want Ant is and the second helped me create my first build file. The third chapter explains the nuts and bolts of Ant datatypes and properties. The third chapter was a little too dense for my first read (or maybe I was too dense for it). No matter, I read it and figured I would refer back later. The next four chapters teach you how to integrate jUnit, run programs using Ant, package a JAR (or WAR, or EAR), and deploy it. Chapter 8 recaps everything from the first section with a reasonable sample project. Large enough to be real, small enough to understand. Part 2 is titled Applying Ant and includes many interesting chapters. Each chapter is like an article about a particular application of Ant such as XDoclet, XML, EJBs, etc. These are great reads and work independently of one another, so you can skip around to what you are interested in. Part 3 talks about Extending Ant by writing tasks, mappers, and filters. Here again, they avoid printing out the API by focusing on practical examples. The appendices have good info as well. The installation section is nice and the XML primer might be helpful for a newbie. Appendix C gives a tour of a number of IDEs and their Ant integration. Appendix D is a real gem. "The Elements of Ant Style" is a brief set of guidelines for the buildfile author. Not only does it provide recommendations, they even followed my favorite maxim from Strunk & White, "Omit needless words." The whole appendix is only 16 pages. Great stuff; highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: It is more about Ant than about what you can do with it...
Review: Very good programmers are often terrible authors.. as you will find out from both this book and the manning book on Struts. Having been written by Ant contributors and "junkies" it tends to be more of an "ant treatise" than a tutorial on how to use
it in the most common and useful situations. So buy it if you want a long and wordy description of of ant and all its quirks,
but you want lots of clean, short, to-the-point, easy to follow
examples you might get disappointed here. Also, be aware that this book is 500 pages long, and if learning routine web and business programming can be boring, wading through 500 pages about how to compile package deploy and test that code is boring beyond belief!
| 
