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.
Outstanding Maven GuideFebruary 15, 2010 Lars Tackmann(Copenhagen, Denmark) This isn't just some obscure Maven reference; It's a super practical guide from the actual people behind Maven with plenty of meat in it. The book covers numerous real world software delivery issues such as multi-module projects, web/enterprise projects, dependency management, automatic testing and documentation. Beside offering practical advice for real problems, the book also includes a well written coverage of the core maven technologies as well as numerous runnable examples. This, coupled with the fact that the book reads nicely, has definitely helped me get unstuck whenever I have found my Java projects to be in turmoil.
Prior to reading this book I must admit that I found Maven to be a tad confusion (to say the least) now I find myself actually understanding Maven and enjoying using its many advanced features to add extra project value.
Only maven book you needSeptember 11, 2009 Steven Koh(Singapore) 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If not for the fair amount of errors in the source code, I would have given it 5 stars.
The concept and explanation from this book is concise and with clarity. Extremely easy to follow and be proficient in Maven.
Bad printing - command lines are illegibleApril 1, 2009 Michael Spaulding(Columbus, Ohio USA) 2 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
VERY VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!January 19, 2009 John R. Vacca(Pomeroy, Ohio) 1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
Just what I wanted to grok Maven fast and deepDecember 4, 2008 Not your average bear(New York, NY USA) 8 out of 8 found this review helpful
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.
