Monday, January 11, 2010

Book Review: Maven By Example

I received a copy of 0.2.1 of the Maven By Example book from Tim O'Brien from Sonatype. I was in the process of learning Maven and moving some of my projects to Maven when Tim contacted me and offered the book to me. He also included a number of copies to give away at my local JUG.

This turned out to be a really good book on learning Maven. It is a Creative Commons licensed book so that it offers the community a chance to update the book and add content. Like any great open source project, giving the community to have a direct chance to update the project produces a better final product.

The most important chapter in the book is chapter 7 which brings together the components of the book into a multi-module enterprise project. The code for the chapter really shows how the components fit together. However, this chapter is lacking a lot of material and does not match the code in the example code in the download.

The chapter needs additional work to explain how to do the project. It really should hand-hold the reader through the chapter, and allow them to use the code in the book to create a project from scratch. I had to download the code to see why examples would not work in the book.

I don't want the previous remarks to seem to critical. They are not meant to be. The book is really well done, and I am glad that I went through it thoroughly. It will serve as a good reference going forward.

You can get a PDF version of the book from here: Maven By Example

2 comments :

David Wallace Croft said...

Is this the right URL?
http://www.sonatype.com/books/mvnex-book/reference/public-book.html

John Yeary said...

That was very interesting. When I clicked on the link, it redirected me to the correct link. I fixed the links. Very strange. Thanks for pointing out the issue. :-)

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