The first Maven book was Maven: A Developer’s Notebook (O’Reilly). That book introduced Maven in a series of steps via a conversation between you and a colleague who already knew how to use Maven. The idea behind the (now-retired) Developer’s Notebook series was that developers learn best when they are sitting next to other developers and going through the same thought processes, learning to code by doing and experimenting. Although the series was successful, the Notebook format had limitations. Notebooks were designed to be “goal-focused” books that take you through a series of steps to achieve very specific goals. By contrast, larger reference books provide comprehensive material that covers the entirety of the topic.

If you read Maven: A Developer’s Notebook, you’ll learn how to create a simple project or a project that creates a WAR from a set of source files. But if you want to find out the specifics of something like the Assembly plugin, you’ll hit an impasse. Because there is currently no well-written reference material for Maven, you have to hunt through plugin documentation on the Maven web site or cull from a series of mailing lists. Once you really dig into Maven, you end up reading through thousands of HTML pages on the Maven site written by hundreds of developers, each with a different idea of what it means to document a plugin. Despite the best efforts of well-meaning volunteers, reading through plugin documentation on the Maven site is frustrating at best, and at worst, it’s a reason to abandon Maven. Quite often, Maven users get stuck because they just can’t find an answer.

This lack of an authoritative (or definitive) reference manual has held Maven back for a few years, and it has been something of a dampening force on Maven adoption. With Maven: The Definitive Guide, we intend to change that situation by providing a comprehensive reference in Part III. In Part II, we’re preserving the narrative progression of a Developer’s Notebook; it is valuable material that helps people learn Maven by example. Thus, here we “introduce by doing,” and in Part III, we fill in the blanks and dig into the details. Where Part III might use a reference table and a program listing detached from an example project, Part II is motivated by real examples.

After reading this part, you should have everything you need to start using Maven. You might need to refer to Part III only when you start customizing Maven by writing custom plugins or when you want more detail about specific plugins.