Customer Reviews

Ant: The Definitive Guide

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I'm very disappointed in this book and here's why.

1. Over half of the book is just a copy of the ANT 1.4.1 javadoc. Something which could be downloaded for free from the ANT website. The ANT commands documentation which you recieve when you download ANT goes into more detail then the javadoc.

2. It doesn't cover ANT 1.5 at all. It doesn't even get a mention, only ANT 1.4.1 and ANT2. Anyone starting off on ANT would more then likely be downloading the ANT 1.5 version and may find some of the information in the book incorrect or out of date.

3. The first part of the book deals with installing and compiling the sources. If the person is knowledgable to do this anyway they wouldn't need the book to tell them. If not they could just download the binaries and save themselves the heartache.

The only good parts where on building custom tasks and build listeners. Stuff which prior to Ant 1.5 wasn't documented that well. However that makes up very little of the book.

If you can read the ANT websites documentation fine you wouldn't need this book at all.

Considering all the Ant build possibilities, this book barely scratches the service. Half the book is nothing more than the API in alphabetical order. I would have liked to see examples that incorporated the optional Ant jar (JUnit), complex EJB builds, deployment on 3rd party application servers like Weblogic, and strategies dealing with multiple wars but these were no where to be found. It would have been nice if there was more discussion on best practices. In addition, the book is poorly written and reads like it was written overnight.

This book should be titled "An introduction to Ant and nothing more." I only wished that I saved my receipt. Go read 'Java Development With Ant'. It is far more comprehensive and 'Definitive'. At first I gave this book 2 stars but after reviewing 'Java Development With Ant' I realized this book was more lacking than I thought. Don't make the same mistake I did!

I have developed some pretty complex build systems with Ant in my career. There is nothing you really can't do with Ant. Out of the box, it will do everything a basic build needs and the bundled documentation will teach you everything you need to know to get started and to develop very complex builds..

However, once in a while you'll find something that Ant doesn't do well or at all. Once you have committed to using it, you are pretty much bound to its limitations. The beauty of Ant is it is very customizable. The problem is none of the ways to customize Ant are very well documented in the public realm.

Basically, there are two major ways to customize Ant; to write a script, using the script task, or to write your own custom tag.

So be aware that my review is coming from a point of view where I expected an actual "Definitive Guide". To be short, I didn't get it. The script task is barely even mentioned in the book. They define what it is and that's all. At least with the bundled documentation they give a few examples. They spend only one chapter on custom tasks and they only cover the parts you can figure out via the bundled documentation.

For example, they use their own jar task to explain a task that would be used in the real world, but they don't bother to explain steps that aren't documented well in the Ant docs. To make things worse, they only show the parts of the example jar task source code that they are willing to explain. The rest is left out.

To be fair, I was able to better comprehend a few things about custom tasks through this book. However, the parts they left out were important enough that I had to hunt them down in the source code of already written Ant tasks anyway, thus defeating the purpose of buying this book. For those of you who aren't very familiar with Ant, the first few chapters explain the concepts of Ant better than the bundled documentation does.

In conclusion, if you are looking to learn Ant, download it and read the bundled documentation. If you like hard copies, then use your friendly printer. If you need the documentation explained a different way, you can always buy this book for a lot more than what it would cost to print out the bundled docs. They are basically the same thing except the bundled docs are a little more thorough and the book explains the concepts of Ant better.

Whilst there are 116 pages of original material in this book after page 116 the book predictably goes into reference mode and prints the whole ant reference. I don't recall reading anything about subtasks during the 116 pages. ie. kicking of sub ant build tasks from within the main ant build file. That's a pretty common requirement for anything non trivial. Otherwise the book is typical O'reily. Full of Content.

One thing I will say is that the coverage of user defined tasks in this book is impressive. So if you are planning to write your own Ant task the book is for you.

I just would have liked to have seen more on using Ant for specific tasks. Kind of like the approach taken in Programming Perl. At a minimum the authors should have included build file samples for building a web application and an enterprise application.

BTW: The same day I bought Java and SOAP and I think this is a much better book but that's another review.

I love most of the O'Reilly books I have, but occasionally there's a dud, and this is one of them. It didn't tell me anything I didn't know from reading the Ant documentation. And it's already out of date, since it covers 1.4.1 rather than 1.5.

Try the Manning book, "Java Development with Ant", by Steve Loughran and Erik Hatcher. It's better in every respect.

For the moment, let's ignore the fact that ant comes with a comprehensive manual.

The book gives a nice overview and motivation for ant, as well as a sample project which will help you get up to speed quickly. There is a comprehensive chapter on data types and a nice example of how to build your own task.

I was happy to see that O'Reilly editing quality remains high which sets it apart from other publishers.

The only complaint I had when I first read the book is that I thought that the codes given to the various task parameters in the task reference were a bit cryptic. The book also mentioned that ant 2.0 was due out in 2002, but here it is 2004 and I only see 1.6. The book also provides installation directions, which should really be an appendix since most folks probably just install the RPM or .deb these days.

But ant does come with an excellent manual, which is up-to-date.

It does appear that the book is not too much more than a cover for this documentation. Unlike the book, the task reference in the bundled manual organizes the tasks by function, which is useful. The list of parameters for each task is better organized: it is in a table, it eschews the ant version for the parameter, and there is a Required column (instead of a cryptic code as in the book).

I'd recommend that you borrow or read this book on safari.oreilly.com for a nice introduction and then use the bundled manual for more examples and a reference.

Hatcher & Loughran's Java Development with Ant blew this book out of the water. I would rather have just went with the online docs than this book, but Hatcher & Loughran is way more than the online docs.

Its a shame, but this book is a real piece of junk. I don't know how long it took the authors to write, but it reads like it was thrown together in a frantic hurry. It also covers an older (1.4.x) version of Ant. Even worse a lot of this information is available from the Ant docs. To be fair this book does give you the basic information about how to use Ant, but it is far from a "definitive guide." Hatcher's book is much better even though its published by Manning.

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.

I really scratch my heads these days on the book reviews hence I'm writing this one. I have this book AND the Manning Ant book.

This book does a great job of teaching you basic fundamentals and how the pieces work. So as an example the other book which is over 600 pages talks about DataTypes BEFORE talking about properties. This book talks about properties FIRST which is a much better progession of complexity IMHO.

This book has some typos. There was also a typo in the Apendix B on how to create a super zip jar of your open source lib jars. This example does not work nor can I find anything on the publisher's site with a fix. :-(

I can understand mistakes but I'm not a big fan of people being lazy or not supporting their web site with current updates. To help further this point the errate site last changed on 7/21/04 an today is 2/8/05 with no clue how to fix the busted example on page 254.

This book I would recomend as an intro or if you just have a small project you want to use Ant for. If your doing J2EE work with things like ejbdoclet the Manning book is a great reference. Don't expect the Manning book to be a good intro. Ironically the Manning book STATES in chapter 3 where they introduce the key concepts that it CAN NOT be digested in one reading.

So basically treat this book as a good salad an the other one as a steak dinner. There are a LOT of folks who really only want a salad for dinner. :-)

Also the salad is about 1/3 of the pages of the steak dinner so if you have to carry one around the salad will fit easier in a book bag. :-)

BTW

I'm not associated with either authors or publishers. I am a software developer by trade and got assigned to fix a year old Ant build that was over 800 lines of text. This book helped me get started down the right path while the Manning book filled in the outer edges. I also managed to reduce our build file down to a little over 100 lines plus it now WORKS but enough about me. :-)

I would recomend it plus I would have given it a 5 star had the publisher shown better diligence on updating the supporting web site.