Review by Billy Barron

"Ant: The Definite Guide" by Tilly & Burke (O'Reilly; ISBN 0-596-00184-3) is the first book on the market (I think another book or two has been released since) about Ant, a build tool primarily for Java. It is interesting to note that Ant was originally by one of the early JavaMUG members and repeated speaker, James Duncan Davidson. He also wrote the foreward of this book.

The timing of this book was excellent for me (too bad it took so long for me to get the review out :-). I was in the process of developing a Java/C hybrid program that runs on multiple Unix versions. I have used Make to compile Java in the past and it is terrible for Java. At my last job, I originally had everything in Makefiles and shell scripts. Later, we moved CVS checkout and Java compilation to Ant, but kept the deployment in the Makefiles with Make driving the process. I was still unhappy, but never had the time to improve it.

On the current project, I am trying to use Ant as much as possible and use Make as little as possible. Anyway, in the end, I decided that Ant was great at Java and lousy at software packaging. Next time I work on a system like this, I am going to use Ant for compilation of Java and making jar files. Then I'm going to use Make for everything else.

Anyway, enough about my experiences with Ant. You are here to read a book review, right? :-) The book starts with a quick example of Ant to get you going fast. Then it covers installation and configuration. Now the book slows down and talks about the build file. It did a good job of explaining what targets are, but I did not feel the book explained the design issues of targets well enough.

The next chapter covers DataTypes. Then it goes into Ant's powerful extension mechanism Taks. It includes an example of a task that builds jar files. The book also covers Listeners, the Core Tasks and the Optional Tasks. It is an excellent reference guide to these. I should mention that I have had numerous compatibility problems with many of the Optional Tasks (especially tar). Now, I mostly avoid the Optional Tasks and invoke the command line instead. This, of course, is not the book's fault.

In conclusion, I found this to be a very good reference book on Ant.