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Maven: The Definitive Guide
For too long, developers have worked on disorganized application projects, where every part seemed to have its own build system, and no common repository existed for information about the state of the project. Now there's help. The long-awaited official documentation to Maven is here.Written by Maven creator Jason Van Zyl and his team at Sonatype, The Definitive Guide clearly explains how this tool can bring order to your software development projects. Maven is largely replacing Ant as the build tool of choice for large open source Java projects because, unlike Ant, Maven is also a project management tool that can run reports, generate a project website, and facilitate communication among members of a working team.To use Maven, everything you need to know is in this guide. The first part demonstrates the tool's capabilities through the development, from ideation to deployment, of several sample applications -- a simple software development project, a simple web application, a multi-module project, and a multi-module enterprise project.The second part offers a complete reference guide that The POM and Project RelationshipsThe Build LifecyclePluginsProject website generationAdvanced site generationReportingPropertiesBuild ProfilesThe Maven RepositoryTeam CollaborationWriting PluginsIDEs such as Eclipse, IntelliJ, ands NetBeansUsing and creating assembliesDeveloping with Maven ArchetypesSeveral sources for Maven have appeared online for some time, but nothing served as an introduction and comprehensive reference guide to this tool -- until now. The Definitive Guide is the ideal book to help you manage development projects for software, web applications, and enterprise applications. And it comes straight from the source.
470 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 12, 2008
49 people are currently reading
110 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
October 21, 2008
This book provides a welcome update to the Maven Developers Notebook from a few years back. This is clearly the work of a wide variety of authors (although Goodreads has Tim O'Brien as the author, the cover says "Sonatype"), but Tim did a great job of merging the various voices so that it wasn't so obvious (unless you read the introduction).
Maven's a great tool and capturing all the information surrounding it isn't really possible - there are too many plugins, corner cases, and usage patterns. But this book comes as close as I imagine is possible.
Maven's a great tool and capturing all the information surrounding it isn't really possible - there are too many plugins, corner cases, and usage patterns. But this book comes as close as I imagine is possible.
February 2, 2009
My rating of 2 stars is not a good a reflection of the quality of the book. I actually thought it was quite thorough and well written. It's much more a reflection of the ratings being "it was ok" and "liked it." I am continually floored by the complexity of Maven, and so this is more an indictment of the tool than it is of the definitive guide to the use of the tool. As a result I can't say that I liked the book, it was just ok.
August 9, 2021
I don't like maven, and thus I don't like this book too much. The book is somehow old, and there are not many new books, so I guess it is still a must read if you have to work with maven, however reading this book will not make you an expert, but it is a first step.
February 6, 2009
If you find yourself using Maven in your day to day work, or you're even thinking about it, this should be an essential addition to your library.
Why? Because in short, the documentation for this astonishingly complex tool falls short of the mark in a number of areas, and this book will fill those gaps as well as provide the necessary modicum of hand holding to get you up and running productively in a very short while.
It's also a much better and more comprehensive reference to Maven's features than much of the online documentation, which suffers from the UNIX manual page syndrome: It's great if you already know how to use it, but nearly unintelligible if you don't.
I can only hope the authors publish additional volumes covering some of the more specific aspects of using Maven's myriad plugins, which can either make your life heaven or hell depending on how well you understand them.
All in all this is a great book, and Timothy O'Brien gets kudos for tackling a touch topic so thoroughly.
Why? Because in short, the documentation for this astonishingly complex tool falls short of the mark in a number of areas, and this book will fill those gaps as well as provide the necessary modicum of hand holding to get you up and running productively in a very short while.
It's also a much better and more comprehensive reference to Maven's features than much of the online documentation, which suffers from the UNIX manual page syndrome: It's great if you already know how to use it, but nearly unintelligible if you don't.
I can only hope the authors publish additional volumes covering some of the more specific aspects of using Maven's myriad plugins, which can either make your life heaven or hell depending on how well you understand them.
All in all this is a great book, and Timothy O'Brien gets kudos for tackling a touch topic so thoroughly.
June 27, 2012
The beginning half of the book goes into what i feel is an excessive amount of detail on developing a web app. The rest of the book was great. It documented a lot of the "unstated conventions" that I've had trouble finding. There are tips and an emphasis on understanding. Not just Maven magic.
I was torn on whether to buy a 4 year old book on an open source technologies. But it is the best book I've read on the topic. Even better than "Better Builds with Maven." I borrowed my teammates copy of "Maven - the Definitive Guide" and am now going to buy my own copy. I want to write in it and circle things!
I was torn on whether to buy a 4 year old book on an open source technologies. But it is the best book I've read on the topic. Even better than "Better Builds with Maven." I borrowed my teammates copy of "Maven - the Definitive Guide" and am now going to buy my own copy. I want to write in it and circle things!
June 19, 2009
The stuff I have to read for work!
To be fair - Maven is a very interesting approach to automating important aspects of project - It's much much more than an ANT or MAKE on steriods.
The whole recursive dependency management if important.
It would appear to be a 'must understand' if you're dealing with many of the more modern FOSS Java frameworks such as Apache ServiceMix or uPortal
It's not the best read but it is "The definitive guide"
To be fair - Maven is a very interesting approach to automating important aspects of project - It's much much more than an ANT or MAKE on steriods.
The whole recursive dependency management if important.
It would appear to be a 'must understand' if you're dealing with many of the more modern FOSS Java frameworks such as Apache ServiceMix or uPortal
It's not the best read but it is "The definitive guide"
May 15, 2010
Very good introduction into Maven, including basic reference for main topics
March 5, 2011
A well written introductory and technical reference on the subject.
January 21, 2013
Useful reference if you are installing and learning maven (which is a decent way of managing dependencies on larger Java projects with many collaborators, e.g. Apache)
October 7, 2012
The book was fine, it's Maven that's the problem.
July 26, 2013
A must read when you are working with Maven. I think Google-ling for solutions when Maven related issues arise is counter-productive.
July 5, 2015
quite good, first part is really narrative, second is a reference
April 10, 2016
First rate and very complete. Unless you are really going beyond ordinary maven functionality you probably don't need this book. Maven is really very easy to use.
January 7, 2019
Reference. Just enough details.
April 6, 2020
Good book for Maven for intermediate level
October 14, 2017
As a Jave developper and working in big projects for multinationals, I never had the possibility to see the underlayer of MVN if not only using it to build and launch my server locally.
Today with this book I'm more confident and just grasped the core of using this wonderful project build tool.
Recommended for every curious JEE developer out there!
Today with this book I'm more confident and just grasped the core of using this wonderful project build tool.
Recommended for every curious JEE developer out there!
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews