It emphasized the use of Ant to automate everything, from unit tests (Junit, Cactus) to building and deploying J2EE applications. I have found it extremely usefull. I didn't know much about using Ant to start with and was confused by the documentation available on the Cactus website. This book cleared it up for me.

The only complaint is that the book is fraught with errors. Especially the code. I haven't downloaded the code off the website yet, but I don't believe any code in the book would compile. On page 154, I found 9 errors in the code.

Good book if you are setting up an automated development environment. You will probably want more than a little experience with Java and be willing to go to the online documentation for Ant to clear up some issues.


Very useful and don't be put of by the XP moniker   May 1, 2002
 3 out of 4 found this review helpful

A very practical book which gets to the nitty gritty of coding and testing without insisting on pair programming (which is difficult for the many one person bands out there!). The book actually helps you quickly get the best out of Ant , Junit, JMeter etc , without re-inventing the wheel.


The right (practical) way to start up a xp java team   April 5, 2002
 11 out of 12 found this review helpful

... I think it's hard to practice all 12 practices of the xp methodology but there are some, the more practical, that are very useful and necessary even if you don't want to make xp: the incremental test first programming, using JUnit, Cactus, HttpUnit and continuous integration, using Ant. The book is about these and more open source tools, which means that we can just download them, use them and if we can, improve them. And this is great. But open source tools often lacks in printed documetation and if you are not involved in their development it could be difficult to start using them. In this case this book is just what you need.
The first part of the book is simply great, well written (I'm italian, as you can read), there's a lot of code (you can download it from the book site). The author divided the example in a simple example (just to start to use the tools) and in a case study, to apply the practice in a real world project. In about 240 pages you will use Ant, JUnit, HttpUnit, Cactus, JMeter, JUnitPerf, and if you are not an expert there is an intro about the j2ee deployment architecture too.
The second part isn't so useful: it's the reference for Ant tag and the api reference (about 150 pages). You would pay the same for the book wothout the reference, so consider it as a gift.