Michael Spaulding said
This looks to be a great book except that in all of the command-line examples the text has been converted to little boxes, making the examples impossible to follow. I've never returned a book to Amazon before, but I think this one needs to go back. They need to pull this book from the "shelves" and reprint it.
John R. Vacca said
Are you looking for a build tool? If you do, then this book is for you! The Sonatype Company has done an outstanding job of writing a book about Maven that is designed to help you build and distribute your project.
Sonatype, begins by describing Maven, and explains how it stacks up to and improves on other build tools throughout time; and, shows you how to install and run it on all platforms. Next, the author discusses preserving the narrative progression of a Developer's Notebook, that helps people learn Maven by example. Finally, Sonatype provides you with a large amount of comprehensive reference material.
After reading this most excellent book, you should have a better idea of what Maven is, what makes it different from some of the other options out there, and how to install it and learn more from the built-in help facilities. More importantly, this book will show you how to build and distribute your project.
Not your average bear said
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.
Robert P. Sinner said
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.
Mustang said
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.
Comments