Today, it’s hard to imagine the entire picture of enterprise Java development without build tools like Maven, Gradle or Ant. These tools play an important role in software development life cycle as they are designed to be good at managing dependencies, incremental compilation, handling different profiles, automated builds and continuous integration. Build tools for Java development have evolved over the years and become mature with Maven is the most popular build tool, Gradle is increasing its popularity, while Ant and Ivy have been declined.

To help you get started or go advanced with these popular build tools, we compile a list of top 7 paperbooks which you are most likely to go with. Here’s the list:

1. Maven: The Definitive Guide
2. Apache Maven Dependency Management
3. Gradle in Action
4. Gradle Beyond the Basics
5. Gradle Effective Implementation Guide
6. Ant in Action
7. Ant: The Definitive Guide

1. Maven: The Definitive Guide

Author: Sonatype Company

Publisher: O'Reilly Media

Published Date: October 4^th, 2008

Paperback: 470 pages

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Content Coverage:

• Part I: Introduction

1. • Introducing Apache Maven
   • Installing and Running Maven

• Part II: Maven by Example

1. • A Simple Maven Project
   • Customizing a Maven Project
   • A Simple Web Application
   • A Multimodule Project
   • Multimodule Enterprise Project

• Part III: Maven Reference
  • Optimizing and Refactoring POMs
  • The Project Object Model
  • The Build Lifecycle
  • Build Profiles
  • Maven Assemblies
  • Properties and Resources Filtering
  • Maven and Eclipse: m2eclipse
  • Site Generation
  • Repository Manager
  • Writing Plugins
  • Writing Plugins in Alternative Languages
• Part IV: Appendixes

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2. Apache Maven Dependency Management

Author: Jonathan Lalou

Publisher: Packt Publishing

Published Date: October 25th, 2013

Paperback: 158 pages

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Content Coverage:

• Chapter 1: Basic Dependency Management
• Chapter 2: Dependency Mechanism and Scopes
• Chapter 3: Dependency Designation (advanced)
• Chapter 4: Migration of Dependencies to Apache Maven
• Chapter 5: Tools within Your IDE
• Chapter 6: Release and Distribute
• Appendix: Useful Public Repositories

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3. Gradle in Action

Author: Benjamin Muschko

Publisher: Manning Publications

Published Date: March 9^th, 2014

Paperback: 480 pages

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Content Coverage:

• Part 1: Introduction to Gradle
  • Introduction to Project Automation
  • Next-generation builds with Gradle
• Part 2: Mastering the Fundamentals
  • Build script essentials
  • Dependency management
  • Multiproject builds
  • Testing with Gradle
  • Extending Gradle
  • Integration and Migration
• Part 3: From Build to Deployment
  • IDE Support and Tooling
  • Building polygot projects
  • Code quality management and monitoring
  • Continuous Integration
  • Artifact assembly and publishing
  • Infrastructure provisioning and deployment

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4. Gradle Beyond the Basics

Author: Tim Berglund

Publisher: O'Reilly Media

Published Date: August 15^th, 2013

Paperback: 80 pages

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Content Coverage:

1. File Operations
   • Copy Task
   • Filtering and Transforming Files
   • The File Methods
   • The FileCollection Interface
   • Lazy Files
2. Custom Plug-Ins
   • Plug-In Philosophy
   • The Plug-In API
   • The Example Plug-In
   • Setup
   • Sketching Out Your Plug-In
   • Packaging a Plug-In
3. Build Hooks
   • The Gradle Lifecycle: A Review
   • Advising the Build Graph
   • Advising Project Evaluation
   • Rules
4. Dependency Management
   • Dependency Concepts
   • Repositories: Dependency Resolution
   • Buildscript Dependencies
   • Dependency Caching
   • Configuring Resolution Strategy

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5. Gradle Effective Implementation Guide

Author: Hubert Klein Ikkink

Publisher: Packt Publishing

Published Date: October 25^th, 2012

Paperback: 382 pages

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Content Coverage:

• Chapter 1: Starting with Gradle
• Chapter 2: Creating Gradle Build Scripts
• Chapter 3: Working with Gradle Build Scripts
• Chapter 4: Using Gradle for Java Projects
• Chapter 5: Dependency Management
• Chapter 6: Testing, Building and Publishing Artifacts
• Chapter 7: Multi-project Builds
• Chapter 8: Mixed Languages
• Chapter 9: Maintaining Code Quality
• Chapter 10: Writing Custom Tasks and Plugins
• Chapter 11: Using Gradle with Continuous Integration
• Chapter 12: IDE Support

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6. Ant in Action

Author: Steve Loughran, Erik Hatcher

Publisher: Manning Publications

Published Date: July 27^th, 2007

Paperback: 600 pages

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Content Coverage:

• Part 1: Learning Ant
  • Introducing Ant
  • A first Ant build
  • Understanding Ant datatypes and properties
  • Testing with JUnit
  • Packaging projects         
  • Executing programs
  • Distributing our application
  • Putting it all together
• Part 2: Appling Ant

1. • Beyond Ant’s core tasks
   • Working with big projects
   • Managing Dependencies
   • Working with XML
   • Enterprise Java
   • Continuous Integration
   • Deployment

• Part 3: Extending Ant

1. • Writing Ant tasks
   • Extending Ant further

• Appendix A: Installation
• Appendix B: XML Primer
• Appendix C: IDE Integration

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7. Ant: The Definitive Guide

Author: Steve Holzner

Publisher: O'Reilly Media

Published Date: April 20^th, 2005

Paperback: 336 pages

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Content Coverage:

1. Getting Started
2. Using Properties and Types
3. Building Java Code
4. Deploying Builds
5. Testing Builds with JUnit
6. Getting Source code from CVS Repositories
7. Executing External Programs
8. Developing for the Web
9. XML and XDoclet
10. Optional Tasks
11. Integrating Ant with Eclipse
12. Extending Ant

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About the Author:

Nam Ha Minh is certified Java programmer (SCJP and SCWCD). He began programming with Java back in the days of Java 1.4 and has been passionate about it ever since. You can connect with him on Facebook and watch his Java videos on YouTube.