Maven: A Developer's Notebook (Developer's Notebooks) (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: logging aspect, team collaboration, continuous integration, Maven Jump-Start, Writing Maven Plug-ins, Vincent Massol (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Maven is a new project management and comprehension tool which provides an elegant way to share build logic across projects. In terms of capabilities, Maven is an improvement to Apache Ant-thanks to numerous plug-ins and built-in integration with unit testing frameworks such as JUnit. Tired of writing the same build logic for every project? Using Maven, you can leverage the experience of the community to avoid the tedious process of creating yet another build script for each new project.

"Maven: A Developer's Notebook" begins by introducing you to the concept of project object model (POM), and then offers further details on the essential features of Maven. Like all titles in O'Reilly's Developer's Notebook series, this no-nonsense book skips the boring prose and cuts right to the chase. It's an approach that forces you to get your hands dirty by working through a series of poignant labs-exercises that speak to you instead of at you.

Plus, "Maven: A Developer's Notebook" is the first book on the subject to hit the market, so you know the information is fresh and timely. If you're a Java programmer, you'll be armed with all the critical information you need to get up to speed on this powerful new build tool. You'll discover how Maven can help you:

manage a project's build, reporting, and documentation, all from a central piece of information

break a complex project into a series of smaller subprojects

report on code quality, unit tests, code duplication, and project activity

create a custom remote repository

build simple and complex plug-ins

In the end, you'll find yourself spending less time working on your project's build system and more time working on yourproject's code.

About the Author

O'Brien is an active committer in the Jakarta Commons, a subproject of the Apache Software Foundation's Jakarta project. As a consultant, Tim tries to encourage the adoption of open source software and nudge organizations to view community participation as an essential strategy. He studied Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia.

Product Details

• Paperback: 191 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; illustrated edition edition (July 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596007507
• ISBN-13: 978-0596007508
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #661,836 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars No longer relevant, March 14, 2007

By	pjc (USA) - See all my reviews

This book does not apply to Maven 2, the current release of Maven. May be useful concept material but because it doesn't apply to the current version of the software it is not a good "Developers Notebook". This book should be pulled from the shelves.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars good on strengths, but key holes, July 27, 2005

By	Jeanne Boyarsky (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

"Maven - A Developer's Notebook" is good for covering the surface of how to do a build in Maven. There is great explanation on the installation of Maven and building Java projects. Coverage of reporting and writing plugins was also good.

Coverage of building WARs was fair. It would have been nice to see a JSP or resource files in the example, rather than just code. Noticeably absent was how to build an EJB project and an EAR. And while the book demonstrates connecting to CVS/Subversion, it could use an example on checking out code.

The book assumes some knowledge of the build process in Java, but not too much. Specifically, it is not necessary to know Ant. For those who do use Ant, common pitfalls are mentioned (without saying they are from Ant.)

In developer's notebook style, the book reads quickly and goes through a series of labs. The authors are good about explaining what things mean and going through the build output. The list of Maven plugins is very useful in finding out what exists.

The book is well thought out, clear and excellent for what it covers. However, I think they tried to cover too much in too little room and wound up having to leave out some key areas. If you were only creating jars or WARs by yourself, I would give this book a 5. But for J2EE and teams, it gets a 4 because it needs the documentation to supplement.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Out of date, March 24, 2007

By	Andy Pippin "aBp_" (Santa Barbara, CA) - See all my reviews

While there is nothing technically wrong about this book, Maven 2 is almost a complete re-write of Maven. This book covers all the ins and outs of using Maven (the project model, dependency resolution, directory hierarchy), but the technical details are now completely out of date.