Learning Ant - Resources [duplicate]

Question

I want to learn about Ant and I am looking for a good book or web resources.

All I know is that Ant is a built tool that maintains dependency between parts of a project up until it is compiled. As I understand, its purpose is to maintain your code that will be fed into the compiler. Nothing more.

Basically I'm looking for more information about the very basic details of Ant, to see if it's worth investing much time in learning. I plan to use it primarily with Java, but I am not sure about the extent that it will help me.

Does anyone have any recommendations for books or web resources I could draw on?

I'm also concerned about differences between versions of the program. Will it pose a problem if I use a book that was written for an older version of Ant?

Answer 1

The requisite Hello World tutorial is where I started. It is a good lower level walk through that will give you a spring board to more complicated task in Ant. Then I would recommend doing simple task to get more familiar with Ant syntax, things like move files, zip/unzip files, get ant to run external programs, etc. @omermuhammed mentioned the Ant-Contrib which is a pretty ubiquitous library, so when you go searching online for example of how to get things done a large amount of the time people will refer to ant-contrib task without mention. So the second thing I would recommend after getting through the Hello World example is to download and get ant-contrib working via this link.

Answer 2

I like this page as a broad overview Ant in Anger, by the author of Ant in Action