Introducing Maven is your quick start-up primer guide on Maven. This fully packed mini-book includes the new features and enhancements found in the latest version of Maven.In this short 100-page book, you'll learn all about Maven and how to set it up to use. You'll learn about the Maven life cycle and how to effectively leverage and use it. Also, you'll learn the basics of using site plugins and generating Javadocs, test coverage/FindBugs reports, version/release notes and more. Furthermore, you'll take advantage of Maven's archetypes to bootstrap new projects easily. Finally, you will learn how to integrate Nexus repository manager with Maven release phases.After reading and using this short book, you'll have an understanding of Maven's dependency management and how to organize basic and multi-module Maven projects.
I used maven infrequently and bought this to brush up my understanding of the maven basics. This book did well on the job, but the exercises didn't work smoothly.
I recommend to download the jdk version as stated in the beginning of the book, and use that for the exercises. If you don't (as I did), you will have to set the compiler source and target version to use 1.6 or higher (as is explained in a later chapter of the book, but you'll need it from the start).
Furthermore, if you want to use the pom-root archetype from codehaus, you will have to add the archetypeVersion parameter like so -DarchetypeVersion=RELEASE this takes the lates available version of the archetype. Without this parameter, maven will not find the archetype and offer you it's standard quickstart archetypes.
Finally it really only just shows you this and that about maven. It's just enough to get started, but it isn't a cookbook either.
So all in all it's a very good book to get you started with maven. :)
This is the book you must start with while beginning your enterprise development journey. No project is built without Maven. It's an absolute must! I find it more easy to follow books than video courses. But if you find time do the one on Pluralsight: Maven Fundamentals. It will give you a better feel of how Maven is used.