Book Review: Maven - A Developer’s Notebook

Maven: A Developer’s Notebook is a recently published book by Vincent Massol and Timothy O’Brien in O’Reilly’s Developer Notebook series. It fills a void in the market for a quality book on Maven. I had a chance to spend some time with Vincent while in Paris earlier in the summer; we talked about the book, his company: Pivolis, the French language and every manner of other topics. I’ve just now taken the time read through the book and should have done so earlier. It’s excellent. Vincent’s passion and focus comes across loud and clear.

According to O’Reilly’s site the Developer Notebook Series “is for early adopters of leading-edge technologies who want to get up to speed quickly on what they can do now with emerging technologies.” This book delivers on that promise, weighing in at under 200 pages, but providing the reader with more than enough to get them up and running quickly. It goes beyond the basics, covering customization via maven.xml, multiproject configuration, site customization, and plugin creation. A very practical set of labs are woven through the book as well; making the book suitable for use in a training class.

It is published at an interesting time with Maven2 in alpha. The book targets Maven 1.x, but Vincent and Tim don’t ignore Maven2. They make frequent references to features Maven2 will offer and help prepare the reader for migration when Maven2 is production ready.

The book comes along with a counterpart web site that offers up info on the book and additional content of interest to the reader: www.mavenbook.org

Some areas for improvement:

• Help the reader understand if Maven isn’t for them. When is it overkill? When would something else be a better choice? What are the alternatives?
• Additional coverage of XDoc; a poorly documented aspect of Maven that is generally learned by looking at other examples (read: cut and paste).

Three and half out of four stars. Great job…