Maven: The Definitive Guide

When I saw the less than 5 star rating I really wanted to add my input. I particularly appreciated the content starting in chapters 6 and 7, about having a hierarchy of related projects, mixing packaging types of pom, jar and war files, reviewing the components of web apps and how they're packaged into Maven, etc.Our team has been working with Maven for 6 months now and I had previously read quite a bit online, plus purchased a couple other Maven books. For where I'm at in my learning curve, this book fits what I needed. I think somebody new to Maven could still follow it; it's not quite a "recipe" oriented as some books, but really clear writing and explicit steps.The book is now a few years old, but these tools and concepts are still relevant today (Q4 2012). If they do an update, I'd suggest a bit more in Chapter 6 about their web.xml file (reason for multiple targets, review the file-class-url mappings, etc.), though none of those issues prevent the chapter from being useful, and is really more of a review for folks who haven't put together a lot of webapps using any framework.

I had used Maven several years back before Maven 2 and didn't like it at all. Then recently I was put on a project that uses Maven2 and I had to come up to speed really fast. I remember from my previous experience with Maven that the documentation was terrible. Since a few years had passed, I was happy to find more help online, but it was scattered all over the place. I finally got a pretty good grasp of Maven and actually started to like it. Then I found this book and it really does a great job at explaining the basics of Maven and then gets into the more complex topics. It is all in one book, in one place, written by the experts. I would recommend this book to anyone who needs to learn Maven quickly and then use the book as a reference as needed when you start doing more complex stuff (like writing Mojos, profiles, etc.).

This is an excellent book. I think the author is clear, informative, and explains all the small stuff that's necessary to get the examples working. I really dont like programming books that label themselves "intermediate" just as an excuse to be lazy and skip explanatory steps. This book is not like that all. As of August 23, 2011, the download site of the books example code still works. I'm able to follow along with the authors explanations and am able to get each chapters code to run easily on my local setup. I'm brand new to Maven, so I'm surprised I could follow along so quickly and painlessly. I'm used to reading programming books where the example code has to be tweaked with the help of searching the Internet for help to get up and running locally. The quality of the writing and the fact that the examples work so easily means this book easily gets high commendations. I hope the author writes more books, because he's very good. I like Cameron MacKenzie books, too.

This isn't just some obscure Maven reference; It's a super practical guide from the actual people behind Maven with plenty of meat in it. The book covers numerous real world software delivery issues such as multi-module projects, web/enterprise projects, dependency management, automatic testing and documentation. Beside offering practical advice for real problems, the book also includes a well written coverage of the core maven technologies as well as numerous runnable examples. This, coupled with the fact that the book reads nicely, has definitely helped me get unstuck whenever I have found my Java projects to be in turmoil.Prior to reading this book I must admit that I found Maven to be a tad confusion (to say the least) now I find myself actually understanding Maven and enjoying using its many advanced features to add extra project value.

The book is not well written. It is not interesting or easy to glean information. It doesn't distinguish fundamental info from extraneous stuff you may never need. I was constantly having to reread paragraphs that you can only interpret if you already know the material. The index is not very helpful in locating the information you need when starting out.You really need to read the entire book before even starting your first small Maven project. I read books thoroughly, if not directly from first to last chapter, but in this case I needed to get up to speed on Maven quickly. This book was terrible for learning on an as-needed basis. Part of this is the nature of Maven. Even relatively simple real world webapp, swing, client-server projects will require multi-modules, an assembly (for custom deployable end product), and properties, and profiles, but even something as simple and basic as naming your output artifact jar or war to fit your current project expectations is scattered throughout later chapters. Most of the stuff I needed (and found via google and Maven documentation) I later found in this book somewhere by the time I finished it.The information on using plugins is particularly weak. You can get by using almost all built in plugins, but this is a significant part of the power of Maven and many Maven users will use plugins for almost everything.The Nexus repository chapter is good and has all you need. You will have to wade through it to get the little bits you really need for your project pom to pull dependencies, deploy snapshots and production artifacts to Nexus, and manually add 3rd party jars to your Nexus.I'd like to give less than three stars but the book is pretty complete, the sample code is good, it is up-to-date for 2.x (and vast majority of 3.x which is very little changed from 2.x) and as of this date there are still no other decent books on Maven. If you are doing real world apps, expect to read the whole book before creating new Maven projects or converting ant projects. You will need to supplement the book with google and Maven documentation (such as it is) and there will be some pain.

Livre usagé, bons commentaires

It's for Maven 2 not Maven 3 and i can't find the example project either.

All the knowledge necessary to implement an amazing architecture

Good one.

This is a really good text on a topic which lots of people (me included) seem to struggle with. Highly recommended.