This second edition of a Manning bestseller has been revised and re-titled to fit the 'In Action' Series by Steve Loughran, an Ant project committer.

Ant in Action

introduces Ant and how to use it for test-driven Java application development. Ant itself is moving to v1.7, a major revision, at the end of 2006 so the timing for the book is right. A single application of increasing complexity, followed throughout the book, shows how an application evolves and how to handle the problems of building and testing. Reviewers have praised the book's coverage of large-projects, Ant's advanced features, and the details and depth of the discussion-all unavailable elsewhere.

This is a major revision with the second half of the book completely new, including:

• How to Manage Big projects

• Library management

• Enterprise Java

• Continuous integration

• Deployment

• Writing new Ant tasks and datatypes

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 10 Ratings

creating a good build process - 2008-03-30
Reviewer Rating:
"Ant in Action" is really the second edition of "Java Development in Ant." I think the original title was more descriptive as the book focuses more on process, tools and techniques than most Ant books. For example, they introduce continuous integration and why you would want to write unit tests. Not that the Ant coverage isn't good - it's excellent - just that the book is so much more. The book assumes you know Java, but walks you through everything else.

Like most Ant books the authors don't rehash the excellent online manual and API. For those new to Ant, features are clearly described with good examples and good descriptions of "what happens if ____." The flow diagrams helped visualize concepts nicely.

For those who have been using Ant, there are margin notes about what was added in 1.6/1.7 along with coverage of Ivy. I also liked the Java 6/JEE 5 examples. The techniques for writing reusable/maintainable code and extending Ant provided significant value. I was a little disappointed that the JUnit examples used JUnit 3.8. The authors did explain the reasoning and I understand their reason. I still would have liked to see it though as this book will still be used when JUnit 4 is in wider use.

Coverage of related tools is also useful. It's good to know what libraries to look into to increase productivity with Ant. I've been using Ant for complex builds for three years and still had a page of take away points from this book. I recommend it for the valuable information and techniques.

Ant In Action - A reference book only - 2009-06-23
Reviewer Rating:
Ant in Action" might end up being a good reference book but only after you learn ANT and this book is not the best as far as helping you learn ANT.

I was very frustrated with isolated example code that was not explained at all. Ant's syntax is not the most straight forward so explanations would have helped.


I would give this book a two star rating at most - for what I paid for the book I expected a lot more.

Everything you wanted to know about Ant and more - 2009-03-17
Reviewer Rating:

Only one you need - 2009-06-18
Reviewer Rating:
As the title says, this is the only ANT book you need.
It is good for beginner to expert.

very usefull reference for web developers as well - 2008-11-07
Reviewer Rating:
I began using Ant as part of my build process for Joomla! (CMS) development to save time on building, debugging, and deploying new Joomla extensions. While Ant and "Ant in Action" are geared toward helping a developer with a Java project it was also very useful for PHP web development. It contained great code examples and covers all of the useful ways one can use ant (many of which people are un-aware of).

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