Customer Reviews

Maven: The Definitive Guide

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Previously the only reference book I could find on maven 2 was BetterBuildsWithMaven. Which was also a good book. However I think that this is a better introductory reference. I think that this book is indispensible for anyone using maven. This book is available online at the sonatype website as well. I like the discussion of the Repository Manager Nexus. We were previously using Archiva and Nexus has worked better. The book does a good job of walking you through simple to complex projects to understand the how to setup projects well in Maven, and learn simple to advanced maven concepts.

I love the book, and I'm not easy to please. I'm a very experienced developer (25+ years) and have worked with Java and XML since 1996. I'd been skeptical about Maven based on earlier versions and bad press, but felt it was time to take a look at Maven 2 and try it out for a client that needed consistent organization of their projects. This book turned out to be ideal in that it is clear, detailed, and unusually well-written. It's filled with realistic Java examples and just enough pom.xml files to learn from without having to leave the page. It pulls off that rare trick of introducing, demonstrating usage, and providing a really knowledgeable voice for in-depth topics.

The first few chapters quickly got me to the point where I was comfortable using Maven on straightforward projects, and the later chapters provide reference-quality info on subjects like running a Repository Manager, Writing Plugins, and details on various settings -- I'll turn to these as I need them, but I trust that they will be valuable if I do.

So I recommend this highly for anyone who wants to know more or needs to implement Maven. There's a desperate need for this because the online resources just weren't good enough to entice me in. But this did, and I'm glad. Tim O'Brien's honest voice and obvious experience are a terrific asset to Maven's broader adoption.

None of the books/documents I've read until now explains Maven like this book. The style and the approach of showing through examples are great. But the example codes are full of errors. It shadows the quality of the maerial.

This is a Maven book right? Not a java book. So if you want to learn the details of Maven in an iterative approach you'd follow the examples. It's best when you don't use an IDE as all IDEs to some degree hide Maven details and you cannot get the essence of it without writing mvn at the command line. The problem is the sample code are full of stupid errors. As if they were not even compiled. Such as passing String to a method expecting and integer, wrong package names. Things that really should have not been in the book.

Therefore I rate this 5 star book as 3 because of the loss of time it caused to me fixing and submitting errata.

I have been skirting the edge of Apache Maven for about 3-4 years now. Maven 1.x was an utter disaster for me to wrap my head around. Maven 2.x is a whole different animal that rapidly allows a developer to begin and configure a project.

The great thing about this book is the explanation of the property management, dependency management & configuration, and overall interrelation of the Project Object Model (POM).

The down side is the coverage on external settings and profiles (settings.xml and profiles.xml) ... They don't work the way described in the book.

Overall great book to have on the shelf in the library.

The book is not well written. It is not interesting or easy to glean information. It doesn't distinguish fundamental info from extraneous stuff you may never need. I was constantly having to reread paragraphs that you can only interpret if you already know the material. The index is not very helpful in locating the information you need when starting out.

You really need to read the entire book before even starting your first small Maven project. I read books thoroughly, if not directly from first to last chapter, but in this case I needed to get up to speed on Maven quickly. This book was terrible for learning on an as-needed basis. Part of this is the nature of Maven. Even relatively simple real world webapp, swing, client-server projects will require multi-modules, an assembly (for custom deployable end product), and properties, and profiles, but even something as simple and basic as naming your output artifact jar or war to fit your current project expectations is scattered throughout later chapters. Most of the stuff I needed (and found via google and Maven documentation) I later found in this book somewhere by the time I finished it.

The information on using plugins is particularly weak. You can get by using almost all built in plugins, but this is a significant part of the power of Maven and many Maven users will use plugins for almost everything.

The Nexus repository chapter is good and has all you need. You will have to wade through it to get the little bits you really need for your project pom to pull dependencies, deploy snapshots and production artifacts to Nexus, and manually add 3rd party jars to your Nexus.

I'd like to give less than three stars but the book is pretty complete, the sample code is good, it is up-to-date for 2.x (and vast majority of 3.x which is very little changed from 2.x) and as of this date there are still no other decent books on Maven. If you are doing real world apps, expect to read the whole book before creating new Maven projects or converting ant projects. You will need to supplement the book with google and Maven documentation (such as it is) and there will be some pain.

I needed to learn Maven quickly, and this book was perfect for my needs. I spent a weekend working through the examples and came away with a good knowledge of Maven. Highly recommended.

I had used Maven several years back before Maven 2 and didn't like it at all. Then recently I was put on a project that uses Maven2 and I had to come up to speed really fast. I remember from my previous experience with Maven that the documentation was terrible. Since a few years had passed, I was happy to find more help online, but it was scattered all over the place. I finally got a pretty good grasp of Maven and actually started to like it. Then I found this book and it really does a great job at explaining the basics of Maven and then gets into the more complex topics. It is all in one book, in one place, written by the experts. I would recommend this book to anyone who needs to learn Maven quickly and then use the book as a reference as needed when you start doing more complex stuff (like writing Mojos, profiles, etc.).

This isn't just some obscure Maven reference; It's a super practical guide from the actual people behind Maven with plenty of meat in it. The book covers numerous real world software delivery issues such as multi-module projects, web/enterprise projects, dependency management, automatic testing and documentation. Beside offering practical advice for real problems, the book also includes a well written coverage of the core maven technologies as well as numerous runnable examples. This, coupled with the fact that the book reads nicely, has definitely helped me get unstuck whenever I have found my Java projects to be in turmoil.

Prior to reading this book I must admit that I found Maven to be a tad confusion (to say the least) now I find myself actually understanding Maven and enjoying using its many advanced features to add extra project value.

If not for the fair amount of errors in the source code, I would have given it 5 stars.

The concept and explanation from this book is concise and with clarity. Extremely easy to follow and be proficient in Maven.

I am new to Maven; this book gave a good introduction. I was in a position to create a multi dependency ear project and this has good source of explanation and examples from their site helped a lot. Thanks again for providing such good compilation at reasonable cost.