If you've never used Ant before, this is the book for you. It covers basic Ant concepts and enough of Ant usage so that you know where to look when you need more help. When you're done with this book you'll know how to set up basic builds, run unit tests and integrate with various environments such as Eclipse.

That said, I find the book frustrating because of its guide nature. Nothing in the book is laid out in a way that makes it easy to use as a reference. Even when you go to a chapter on a particular topic, the information you need quickly is presented in the right form. Now that I'm familiar with Ant I find using online references adequate for just about everything.

They removed this really nice reference section in this (2nd) edition. That reference section is what really got me going in ant. I suppose the information is in the ant documentation, but I liked having it in the book.

Overall, the book is still ok.

Buy this book and read it from beginning to end. The opening chapters give you an overview of the topic--from there, you can move on to neat topics like Web development, XML, and integrating with Eclipse. This book is well written and easy to understand; it's a great reference for both beginners and people with some experience with Ant.

This book is exactly what it's title says: a *guide* to using Apache Ant, particularly for Java development. Note, though, that it is *not* a *reference*. It does not describe each Ant task in detail, nor does it document all the allowable Ant XML elements.

That's why I was disappointed with this book, and only gave it three stars. O'Reilly has an unfortunate habit of giving the same type of title to any of its books on a subject, regardless of their real content. Thus, "HTML and XHTML: The Definitive Guide" is a both a *guide* and a *reference*, and pretty much the only HTML book you need.

"Ant", on the other hand, really needs a companion reference for more experienced Ant users. Anyone who uses Ant soon realizes that the online documentation is less than stellar.

This book is a necessary starting point for Ant; now we need more! Ant, after all, is worth documenting, since it's *much* better than any alternative out there.

I bought this book for a real web project implementation that I was working on, and with a few of prior ant expirience. I used it mainly for building a web site
(booksPrice), and the book was really worth it. I got more knowledge on how to use ant for deploying web applications, and how to use it from eclipse, the ide I was working on.
I did not read all the book (well, I usually just read the parts I need on these books), but the parts I did read from the book were very good.

I knew a little bit about ant tool before this book. It was very often struggle for me to set properly new values of properties. Now I know why. So this book gives a lot of useful information. It also gives complete survey of all ant tasks. But sometimes it seemed to me that there is too much pages with just drought list of possible options, attributes, tasks and elements. I would appreciate more pages with examples. The examles which you can download to this book are quite explanatory but sometimes it is problem to run them because you need another jar files from other sites (especially EJB).
But even so I am happy I bought this book. When I meet a problem I know where to find it in the book.

In the Java world, Ant is perhaps the most popular program for building applications. If you came to Java from a C/C++/unix background, as most of us did, then you've used make. Which can certainly still be used for Java apps. But the book shows how Ant has carried the idea further.

Notably in its use of XML files for control. This lets Ant key off the tremendous expressive flexibility of XML. So useful is the idea that about half the book seems to cite XML examples.

The book also goes into integration of Ant with other utilities. Like CVS depots for version control. And for testing builds in an automated manner, Ant can easily work with JUnit. It may well be that the integration explanations are the most useful parts of the book, for they go well beyond simple, standalone usages of Ant.

I have the first edition, which is more of a "how to use ant" book. The second edition is a "how to make ant useful" book. In that way, the second edition is completely different from the first. The chapters are "task" oriented as opposed to descriptions of Ant APIs. For example, "Deploying Builds" covers various Ant tasks and properties that will help you put together an Ant build.xml to deploy a build. An easy way to see if the book will work for you is to check the chapter headings.

Well written and pretty comprehensive - whether you're already comfortable with ant or new to ant, this is definately a great book to pick up.

I repeat: Buy this book. End of review.
Just kidding. About the latter, not the former. Why should you buy this book? Well, to be brutally honest, the online documentation sucks. I'm sorry, but it does. Look, I love and appreciate everything the Apache Jakarta Project gives us - for free! - but all of their projects have one thing in common: a dearth of documentation. I can understand the reason for this - programming is more fun than writing doc. But I don't agree with it. Especially when one frequently wastes hours on even the simplest of tasks due to incomplete or inaccurate documentation. In Ant's case I found direct contradictory information between the online documentation and comments in the sample build files - which we all use to get started. And it wasn't about some minor, deeply buried nuance; it was a major, in-your-face, important point. (Sorry, I can't remember exactly what it was. But I do remember just shaking my head in disbelief - it was that major and that bad.)
Ant has evolved into a complex tool. The sample build files are nice, but neither they nor the online doc *explain* how things work, which means you really don't have a good gut feeling about what you are doing when it comes time to expand their functionality.
Enter this book. It is clear, comprehensive and well-written. But here is what I really like about it: You need only read the first few chapters to get the overall gist of how Ant works, then you can go directly to subsequent chapters only if and when you need specific information, for example, getting source code from CVS, executing external programs, integrating with Eclpse, etc. This is a refreshing (and needed) change in today's world of 900+ page books that only make you realize that there is waaay too much information for you to absorb on a subject - especially since you are no doubt already overworked, overstressed and behind schedule.

I learned something on page 2 -- ANT stands for Another Neat Tool. I was surprised, I always thought ANT was a pretty dull tool. To be sure, every time I wanted it to do something I could eventually get it to do it. (Actually I went and got help from the guru.) That reached a point where I got handed this book and told to go away.

First, of course, I turned to the index, looked up what I wanted to do, went to the proper page and it didn't make any sense at all.

Son-of-a-gun!

The guru said, "have you read the manual?"

"Well, not all of it."

"Go read the manual, start at page one."

I did. And the surprising thing was that it didn't take long at all. From the beginning, it made pretty good sense. And as I got further into it I started finding something neat that I should do about every six or ten pages.

ANT is a pretty powerful program.

The book? It's an O'Reilly book, professionally written for professional programmers, what more can I say. Oh yes, it's a new book, and it covers ANT 1.6.

Highly Recommended!

With a number of the books I review, there's there assumption that the reader knows and uses Ant to build the projects and run the program. Since I don't know Ant, I got a copy of Ant - The Definitive Guide (2nd Edition) by Steve Holzner (O'Reilly). This should fill my knowledge gap nicely...

Chapter List: Getting Started; Using Properties and Types; Building Java Code; Deploying Builds; Testing Builds with JUnit; Getting Source Code from CVS Repositories; Executing External Programs; Developing for the Web; XML and XDoclet; Optional Tasks; Integrating Ant with Eclipse; Extending Ant; Index

Most of the Definite Guide books are light on hand-holding and heavy on covering all the aspects of the subject being discussed. This guide also dives right in, but there's enough coverage of the basics to allow a newbie such as myself to actually understand the basic structure of an Ant file and get started. That basic information is quickly built on, and in little time you're able to do most of the tasks you'll ever encounter for an Ant build. I was always a little intimidated when I'd see Ant examples in other books, but now I have the tools I need to understand and use it.

I was also a little surprised (and highly pleased) to see how well Ant integrates with Eclipse. Rather than just sitting down in front of Notepad, you can take advantage of all the niceties of the Eclipse IDE in order to get an accurate and syntactically correct Ant file in short order. Being able to run the Ant file from within Eclipse is also pretty cool.

This is another one of those books that will be under close watch at my desk to make sure it doesn't get "borrowed". This book will end up becoming a best friend in short order...