To further what Steve has said about our forthcoming book [1,2], we are covering much more than would even be reasonable for the Ant docs. We cover lots of real-world situations from web development, XML issues, EJB projects, and Web Services. These involve several 3rd party tools such as XDoclet, Cactus, Middlegen, and others, which really do not make sense to be documented in Ant's own manual. If real-world build/test/deploy issues are what you want to see written about, our book is it. Its going to be ~550+ pages.
We do not repeat Ant's docs at all besides, as Steve mentioned, to include an Appendix task reference which is code generated using XDoclet, <concat>, <xslt>, and a few fiddly Microsoft Word style changes. As a matter of fact, I'll probably include a brief summary of the steps used to auto-generate the task reference. Look for the Javadocs in Ant's codebase to dramatically improve in the next week or so as we clean them up to make generating documentation much cleaner (not just for our book, for Ant's future documentation as well!). I worked with Hightower and Lesiecki on the Java Tools book (wrote bits of the HttpUnit stuff, but that is all other than perusing it as it was in progress) - and definitely expressed concerns on their Ant work to them. In all fairness, they wrote that book in 1/4 of the time Steve and I have been spending on our book and they did a bang-up job considering their constraints. I personally did not understand why the Ant API was printed there, as its irrelevant to almost all Ant users, and the few it is relevant to would probably use the current Javadocs instead. [1] http://www.manning.com/antbook/ [2] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1930110588 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Bailey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Ant Users List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2002 12:42 PM Subject: RE: Ant: The Definitive Guide (Orielly) > And, what does the book provide that the online docs do not? For example, I > have a copy of "Java Tools for Extreme Programming: Mastering Open Source > Tools Including Ant, JUnit, and Cactus". THe sections on Ant are really > weak. If you'd never seen Ant before, they'd help, but it doesn't even > cover as much as the online docs (and in fact, even says to go read the "Ant > in Anger" article first :) > > If the Definitive Guide book gets really in-depth and provides a lot of > examples of really complicated build needs, that might be useful (e.g. I'm > thinking that a "Cookbook" version would be more useful). -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
