This book is basically a rehash of the product docs that come with Ant. There are some examples included, but for the most part, there isn't any information in this book that can't be gleemed from the documentation.
If you are someone that likes to printed examples available, then this book will be useful. The examples seemed to be fairly well formed and complete (although not all the complex topics are covered in adequate detail).
Ohterwise, if you are looking for a Ant reference that will cover complex examples, and include strategies for using the tool properly, look elsewhere.

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!

This book is good if you have no idea what Ant is about. The book lacks creative code examples, and doesn't explore many things that Ant is capable of doing. The book should be called "Ant the Definitive Introduction". I think the Ant Developer's Guide does a better job of touching into the depth of Ant's capability. However, the book would be very good for an Ant newbie.

I really scratch my heads these days on the book reviews hence I'm writing this one. I have this book AND the Manning Ant book.

This book does a great job of teaching you basic fundamentals and how the pieces work. So as an example the other book which is over 600 pages talks about DataTypes BEFORE talking about properties. This book talks about properties FIRST which is a much better progession of complexity IMHO.

This book has some typos. There was also a typo in the Apendix B on how to create a super zip jar of your open source lib jars. This example does not work nor can I find anything on the publisher's site with a fix. :-(

I can understand mistakes but I'm not a big fan of people being lazy or not supporting their web site with current updates. To help further this point the errate site last changed on 7/21/04 an today is 2/8/05 with no clue how to fix the busted example on page 254.

This book I would recomend as an intro or if you just have a small project you want to use Ant for. If your doing J2EE work with things like ejbdoclet the Manning book is a great reference. Don't expect the Manning book to be a good intro. Ironically the Manning book STATES in chapter 3 where they introduce the key concepts that it CAN NOT be digested in one reading.

So basically treat this book as a good salad an the other one as a steak dinner. There are a LOT of folks who really only want a salad for dinner. :-)

Also the salad is about 1/3 of the pages of the steak dinner so if you have to carry one around the salad will fit easier in a book bag. :-)

BTW

I'm not associated with either authors or publishers. I am a software developer by trade and got assigned to fix a year old Ant build that was over 800 lines of text. This book helped me get started down the right path while the Manning book filled in the outer edges. I also managed to reduce our build file down to a little over 100 lines plus it now WORKS but enough about me. :-)

I would recomend it plus I would have given it a 5 star had the publisher shown better diligence on updating the supporting web site.

this is a great book for getting your knowledge past the basics in ant, but i don't think it is the best reference. use this book to learn ant and use online help for reference.