Manning have released Java Development with Ant, written by two Apache Ant project core developers, Erik Hatcher and Steve Loughran, and including coverage of the new features in Ant 1.5.

Ant is a cross-platform Java- and XML-based build tool that the Apache Jakarta Project describes as "kind of like Make, but without Make's wrinkles and with the full portability of pure Java code".

Along with covering Ant basics (datatypes and properties, testing with JUnit [full chapter available online 300KB PDF], program execution, packaging, and deployment), Hatcher and Steve Loughran devote an entire chapter to the specifics of XML processing in the build -- from validating files against local copies of DTDs to XSLT transforms of Ant build logs themselves into readable HTML -- and another to Web Services development [full chapter available online 250KB PDF], showing how you can use Ant to deploy to Axis, and then how to "generate and run unit tests against the endpoint, before going on to build and run a .NET client from inside Ant for interoperability testing".

The heart of the 630-page book focuses on topics related to "solving hard software project problems", with chapters devoted to:

The book closes with two chapters that provide details about how to extend Ant with by writing custom tasks, listeners, selectors and filters (the key ways to extend Ant without making changes to the source), and with several appendices, including a 60-page Ant task reference [full text available online 2.4MB PDF].

Source code for the examples and related library files are also available online.