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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A cover on the online docs, August 26, 2002
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.
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