The topic as a whole is not for the faint hearted, but any intermediate level developer should be able to follow the logic and examples laid out here with relative ease. The book ends with the “good stuff” on API usage and Ant tasks, both of which allow you to execute custom code on particular files in your project. Much of this becomes self-explanatory after a while and is either a testament to the ease of his writing, or the simplicity of the original Ant design. From here, Moodie takes a very practical approach by taking a real-world project and demonstrates how to build it. This is taken at a sensible speed, given its importance to the process. Beginning with a gentle introduction to Ant and its installation, the book quickly moves onto the basic mechanisms of Ant. Whether by accident or design, it is a good approach for books like this The contentsĪt a surprising small 340 pages, this book still packs a lot between the covers. The book is ordered sequentially from simple common tasks, to more complex, specific, ones. It does this by opening up a lot of basic functionality of Ant early on, thereby limiting the number of “What if?” questions you may have.

It gets into the material quickly and effectively, creating confidence in the book and the readers ability to effectively use Ant. The first impressions are good, allaying any initial fears that the book would be one-sided, focusing too heavily on either reference or manual descriptions. It is a combination of reference manual and user guide, which demonstrates how to create Ant scripts that can compile projects, test them, and perform the many other manual tasks involved in the build pipeline, above and beyond standard compilation phase.

This book covers the popular Java-oriented build tool, Ant.

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