Maven: The Definitive Guide

By Sonatype Company
September 2008
Pages: 468
ISBN 10: 0-596-51733-5 | ISBN 13: 9780596517335
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 Description

Written by Maven creator Jason Van Zyl and his team at Sonatype, Maven: The Definitive Guide clearly explains how this popular tool can bring order to your software development projects. The first part of the book demonstrates Maven's capabilities through the development of several sample applications from ideation to deployment, and the second part offers a complete reference guide. Concise and to the point, this is the only guide you need to manage your project.
Full Description

For too long, developers have worked on disorganized application projects, where every part seemed to have its own build system, and no common repository existed for information about the state of the project. Now there's help. The long-awaited official documentation to Maven is here.

Written by Maven creator Jason Van Zyl and his team at Sonatype, Maven: The Definitive Guide clearly explains how this tool can bring order to your software development projects. Maven is largely replacing Ant as the build tool of choice for large open source Java projects because, unlike Ant, Maven is also a project management tool that can run reports, generate a project website, and facilitate communication among members of a working team.

To use Maven, everything you need to know is in this guide. The first part demonstrates the tool's capabilities through the development, from ideation to deployment, of several sample applications -- a simple software development project, a simple web application, a multi-module project, and a multi-module enterprise project.

The second part offers a complete reference guide that includes:

  • The POM and Project Relationships
  • The Build Lifecycle
  • Plugins
  • Project website generation
  • Advanced site generation
  • Reporting
  • Properties
  • Build Profiles
  • The Maven Repository
  • Team Collaboration
  • Writing Plugins
  • IDEs such as Eclipse, IntelliJ, ands NetBeans
  • Using and creating assemblies
  • Developing with Maven Archetypes

Several sources for Maven have appeared online for some time, but nothing served as an introduction and comprehensive reference guide to this tool -- until now. Maven: The Definitive Guide is the ideal book to help you manage development projects for software, web applications, and enterprise applications. And it comes straight from the source.


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Everything I wanted and more,  December 03 2008
Rating: StarStarStarStarStar
Submitted by Dirk Gently   [Respond | View]

This book simply did a top-notch job of getting me familiar with Maven and then showing me the right way to use it effectively. It was not only smart in its organization but so well-written and illustrated with excellent examples that it made me *want* to use Maven immediately.

In other words, if you've gotten this far, just buy the book. It's a really good one.



Re: Good book but full of code errors,  December 03 2008
Submitted by Sonatype Company | O'Reilly Author   [Respond | View]

Which version did you read? The online version or the print version? The online version has a Get Satisfaction page that allows people to identify issues. We've had a few, but not an overwhelming amount. We'll make sure to do more technical proofing for future revisions.

Also, I'd encourage you to download the example ZIP from the O'Reilly site.


Good book but full of code errors,  November 29 2008
Rating: StarStarStarStarStar
Submitted by Mustang   [Respond | View]

Approach: 5 stars
Examples: 5 stars
Material: 5 stars
Code quality: 1 star

Loss of time due to fixing stupid errors: -2 stars

The book really deserves much better but I'm VERY glad that I did not pay for that. Because it took me a lot of time trying to work the examples out. The book is available online at the company's site as well as Safari. I'd really be disappointed if I bought this book in print.

My point is simple. I want to learn maven. I want to be able to get deep. So while reading the books examples, I avoid using an IDE.

What happens when you don't use an IDE and use an editor instead? You don't get feedback on syntax errors, type checing errors package names etc.

Well I want to learn Maven not java. I know java. I expect the sample code to work. So I copy and paste the code. That's where the problems starts.

There are so many errors even in simple pom.xml snippets.

How could you miss closing tags in a 5 line XML?

Bottomline, material is good, code quality is lousy. I wouldn't expect this from an O'Reilly book.


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Awesome resource,  October 01 2008
Rating: StarStarStarStarStar
Submitted by Anonymous Reader   [Respond | View]

Very helpful, this book pretty much answers all of my questions about Maven. Thanks for making so much of it openly available as well.


Matt Doar photo What is that animal, could it be an ...,  June 02 2008
Submitted by Matt Doar | O'Reilly Author   [Respond | View]

Anteater? That's a *terrible* pun!

Media reviews
"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"
-- John R. Vacca, Amazon.com



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