Ant in Action: Covers Ant 1.7 (Manning) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)A 500+ page book about a build tool. I guess your initial reaction might be the same as mine. Why would we need so much pages to describe a build tool.

Well, after reading "Ant in Action" I concluded, it doesn't need. The book just described much more than just Ant.

The book consists of three parts. The first part is called "Learning Ant". This is basically the build tool part, which describes the basics of Ant and how to use it. Well actually, in part one it already goes a little further to also include unit testing and already some deployment related information.

The second part is called "Applying Ant" and goes well beyond just describing Ant. Chapter 10 describes working in large projects. Chapter 11talks about managing dependencies and introduces Ivy. Chapter 15 introduces continuous integration and introduces Luntbuild (not sure why the authors not chose to describe CruiseControl, which is absolutely the most used CI tool). Chapter 16 alone would already be a reason to get the book and it talks about automating deployment and introduces a tool called Smartfrog.

The third parts is called "extending ant" and explains how you can extend ant, develop your own tasks and test them using AntUnit. It describes how ant is implemented so that you know how to extend it (and probably how to develop for it further).

When I started my journey through this book, I was a simple Ant user. The authors showed me that there are so much things possible with Ant and also explored the world around Ant. After finishing the book, I felt I have learned so much and it certainly improved my build scripting abilities. An absolute must read.

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Product Description:

This second edition of a Manning bestseller has been revised and re-titled to fit the 'In Action' Series by Steve Loughran, an Ant project committer. Ant in Action introduces Ant and how to use it for test-driven Java application development. Ant itself is moving to v1.7, a major revision, at the end of 2006 so the timing for the book is right. A single application of increasing complexity, followed throughout the book, shows how an application evolves and how to handle the problems of building and testing. Reviewers have praised the book's coverage of large-projects, Ant's advanced features, and the details and depth of the discussion-all unavailable elsewhere. This is a major revision with the second half of the book completely new, including:How to Manage Big projects Library management Enterprise Java Continuous integration Deployment Writing new Ant tasks and datatypes

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