Part II. Maven by Example

The first Maven book was Maven: A Developer’s Notebook (O’Reilly). That book introduced Maven in a series of steps via a conversation between you and a colleague who already knew how to use Maven. The idea behind the (now-retired) Developer’s Notebook series was that developers learn best when they are sitting next to other developers and going through the same thought processes, learning to code by doing and experimenting. Although the series was successful, the Notebook format had limitations. Notebooks were designed to be “goal-focused” books that take you through a series of steps to achieve very specific goals. By contrast, larger reference books provide comprehensive material that covers the entirety of the topic.

If you read Maven: A Developer’s Notebook, you’ll learn how to create a simple project or a project that creates a WAR from a set of source files. But if you want to find out the specifics of something like the Assembly plugin, you’ll hit an impasse. Because there is currently no well-written reference material for Maven, you have to hunt through plugin documentation on the Maven web site or cull from a series of mailing lists. Once you really dig into Maven, you end up reading through thousands of HTML pages on the Maven site written by hundreds of developers, each with a different idea of what it means to document a plugin. Despite the best efforts of well-meaning volunteers, reading through plugin documentation on the ...

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