Friday, April 27, 2007

[Tech] Maven: The Definitive Guide

Ok, today is the day of micro-postings, however, this might be interesting and good news for some developers. Apache Maven got a new online-book. Maven is a great tool for build-automation, a deployment tool, a dependency management tool, a documentation generator and reporting framework and is implementing build-lifecyle-best-practices and propagates the convention over configuration idea and so forth. A lot of features, a lot to know and learn. However since version 2 Maven is definitly taking off and apparently replacing Ant in many projects.

So, for all who need more information than there is provided on the Maven website, check out the two free Maven books:
I think both books are useful; up to now I mostly used the Mergere book, but it is lacking some important information, e.g., the documentation generation (site) is practically non-existent in this book, but well described in the "definitive guide." It should however be mentioned, that the "definitive guide" is apparently not completly finished yet. For example the "Mojo" chapter lacks description of mojos in Ant (which is a pity from my point of view), also Beanshell and Ruby are only available as heading. So some "TODOs" are still in the text, but it is still worth a look!

So let's hope the author(s) have enough motivation to continue the work on the book. (btw: it is funny, that I found nowhere a reference who the authors of this book would be? any ideas?!)

4 comments:

Eric Redmond said...

Yeah, I do know who the authors are :) Me (Eric Redmond), John Casey and Jason van Zyl.

Also, yes, the book is very much in flux. We decided to release it now rather than later and get some feedback through the process - as well as let people use the pieces that are done. This is why the top page prominently displays "1.0 Alpha 1"... we want people to understand this is very much a work-in-progress.

Alexander Schatten said...

Excellent, thank you for that information! I might be a little bit clumsy here, but I could not find a titlepage. I did find the links I posted in the Blog, but I did find no link from there to a titlepage that would list the authors...?

And again, thank you for sharing that book.

Sageniuz said...

You also should check out the new Maven-blog. This blog provides a pdf-version of the maven book (Maven: The Definitive Guide).

There is also a new article about investing in infrastructure with Maven.

Anonymous said...

Is there any way to get it in print?