Hi folks,
I have a sufficient amount of experience with ant so far, but I am interested in learning more about maven. It seems really opaque. Can you recommend a good introduction to maven -- I'm looking for as much clarity and simplicity as possible.
I suppose I'm looking specifically for information on maven 2 if it comes down to it.
I found the book "Better Builds with Maven" to be a pretty good introduction. You can download it for free: http://www.exist.com/better-build-maven
The book Maven: The Definitive Guide provides an introduction to Maven and covers many of the problems that arise when using Maven.
The Maven documentation is a bit vague and outdated in places, but the usage examples for plugins are usually good enough to get you going with what you need to do. Also find projects that are utilizing Maven and look into their pom.xml configurations learn more about what is possible with Maven.
Don't waste your time, just look at what other people are saying and do some more research. Maven is not worth it.