Pragmatic Project Automation: How to Build, Deploy, and Monitor Java Apps

by Mike Clark

Forget wizards, you need a slave--someone to do your repetitive, tedious and boring tasks, without complaint and without pay, so you'll have more time to design and write exciting code. Indeed, that's what computers are for. You can enlist your own computer to automate all of your project's repetitive tasks, ranging from individual builds and running unit tests through to full product release, customer deployment, and monitoring the system.

Many teams try to do these tasks by hand. That's usually a really bad idea: people just aren't as good at repetitive tasks as machines. You run the risk of doing it differently the one time it matters, on one machine but not another, or doing it just plain wrong. But the computer can do these tasks for you the same way, time after time, without bothering you. You can transform these labor-intensive, boring and potentially risky chores into automatic, background processes that just work.

In this eagerly anticipated book, you'll find a variety of popular, open-source tools to help automate your project. With this book, you will learn:

How to make your build processes accurate, reliable, fast, and easy. How to build complex systems at the touch of a button. How to build, test, and release software automatically, with no human intervention. Technologies and tools available for automation: which to use and when. Tricks and tips from the masters (do you know how to have your cell phone tell you that your build just failed?) You'll find easy-to-implement recipes to automate your Java project, using the same popular style as the rest of our Jolt Productivity Award-winning Starter Kit books. Armed with plenty of examples and concrete, pragmatic advice, you'll find it's easy to get started and reap the benefits of modern software development. You can begin to enjoy pragmatic, automatic, unattended software production that's reliable and accurate every time.

Genres: Programming, Software, Technology, Technical, Computer Science, Computers, Engineering

176 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2004

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Please see: Mike Clark


Mike Clark is an author, speaker, consultant, and most importantly, he's a programmer. He is co-author of Bitter EJB (Manning), editor of the JUnit FAQ, and frequent speaker at software development conferences. Mike has been crafting software professionally since 1992 in the fields of aerospace, telecommunications, financial services, and the Internet. In addition to helping develop commercial software tools, Mike is the creator of several popular open-source tools including JUnitPerf and JDepend.

Reviews

[Marcin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book presents very good concepts of project automation. However, it seems to be little outdated in terms of tools presented.

[Jan Goodamn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very concise introduction to the subject.
Could use less ant and more maven.

[Wesen · Rating 3 out of 5]

good insights into an automated workflow, the book however focuses heavily on the technical side (cruisecontrol, ant) while i would have liked to have more details and concrete setup examples, i can read software documentation just fine. the insight into the groovy AntBuilder was cool, that's something I will look into.

[Daniel Galassi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was written well before the Continuous Delivery movement and in many ways, it contains most of the advice perceived as ground-breaking over the last few years.
Most concepts are not only still relevant but more effectively and efficiently delivered through CI and CD tools and practices.

[Ivan · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's OK for a very short introduction (or like a 100-something pages elevator pitch) to project automation but falls embarrassingly short for someone that wants to dive deep into the guts and techniques of automation/monitoring server-side projects.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good starting point for learning CruiseControl. Also has a lot of other good tips and pointers for automating many processes throughout the life of a project.

[Ronald · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit dated but the principals still hold.

[Zlatin Stanimirov · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is informative and fun to read. It handles only the automation on source code level. There are no tips on automating the environment.