Customer Reviews

Ant Developer's Handbook

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I needed a reference on Ant, and I decided to buy this one despite a negative review. The book is well-organized and well-written in a style that most developers will like.

The first three chapters do a wonderful job of introducing Ants capabilities and what you should use it for. I was already using Ant, but I learned a lot more about how I can make better use of it.

The fourth chapter is a reference of all the tags and how to use them. So far I have found that they are pretty accurate, and as an experienced user I assume that I can figure out anything that turns out to be changed (since this software is always subject to change) or even wrong.

The final chapters discuss advanced material, such as extending Ant with custom tasks, debugging build scripts, and setting up nightly builds. I feel that the book does a good job of explaining the how and why of these topics, too.

Overall, the organization of the book is similar to Oreilly's Unix in a Nutshell, where there are several chapters of reference material and a catalog of commands. I like that kind of book because it cuts to the chase for experienced users. Part of the reason I wanted this book was to structure my Ant projects intelligently, and I got my money's worth for that.

Ant has become a widely used tool and should be part of every developer's toolkit. This book is a nice introduction for the developer who is unfamiliar with Ant and is looking to get started using it. If you are a developer who is experienced with Ant then this book will not be of much interest to you. The book starts with a nice introduction to Ant showing how to create and use a typical build script. The first three chapters cover the basics of Ant and the authors do a nice job of making Ant simple to understand. The next two chapters cover all the built-in and optional tasks that are part of Ant. This section is of limited use to the new Ant user. Since the tasks are listed in alphabetical order and broken out into separate chapters for built-in and optional tasks, you have to know what you are looking for in order to find it. It would have been nice to have a list of all the tasks with a brief description all in one or two pages which would have made it much easier to find a task. There is one brief chapter explaining how to write your own Ant tasks. Troubleshooting Ant scripts is followed by two chapters showing real world examples of using Ant. The book ends with a discussion of tool support. Conclusion: the authors have done a very nice job of explaining Ant for the novice Ant user.

This book is absolutely worthless as an ant reference. EVERY time that I go to read a particular section of the book for fine-grained information it has proven to be a disaster. The book is simply WRONG on many of it's definitions and statements of functionality.

I have never taken the time to actually write a quick review, but fealt that I would be doing a huge disservice to fellow coders if I didn't in this case.

Heed my warning: DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK.

This is one of the best books I have read to date on developing Java applications with ANT. I'd highly recomend it to anyone interested in saving time writting JAVA applications.