Welcome to Ant, today's premiere build tool. Ant is an extraordinary tool, and it fills a long-standing need among developers. No longer do you have to try to remember the 50 steps to build your project and make sure you do them in the right order or try to get finicky makefiles just right. Now you've got a true build tool that's genuinely easy to work withand outstandingly powerful. If you've never used Ant, you're in for a treat.

We're going to push the envelope in this book, working from the basics through the advanced, doing nearly everything that Ant can do. This book was designed to open up Ant and make it more accessible than any other book on the subject. It's a programmer-to-programmer book, written to make you an Ant pro without wasting time.

If you're a programmer, this book is written to give you exactly what you want to see, which is the good stuff and only the good stuff. There's as much Ant crammed into this book as you need to master the topic, and mastering Ant is the goal.