Ant in Action 2nd Ed.- Get it while it’s hot
So Manning released the long awaited Ant in Action 2nd edition as of today.
As you can expect from Steve (Loughran), it’s a thorough description of every bit and pieces that can be automated as part of your build with clear practical examples. Besides Ant, it drives you through the use of Ivy to manage dependencies and SmartFrog to handle deployment.
The book alone is worth it for those chapters and it should be the companion book to every engineer in the java world from my point of view.
Now I wish Steve would do an entire book about deployment with SmartFrog: ‘SmartFrog in Action’ and gives lots of details on how they use it at their HP datacenters (hint hint) 
For people interested in, there’s Steve’s presentation Distributed Testing with SmartFrog
NB: For the sake of completeness, in the same category of SmartFrog there’s also Puppet if you feel more comfortable having Ruby than Java.
