Ant Developer's Handbook
by
Kirk Pepperdine, Alan Williamson, Joey Gibson, Andy Wu
Sams
1 edition
November 2002
456 pages
Reviewed by Thomas Paul, April 2003
(7 of 10)
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.
(7 of 10)
