Chapter 1. Introducing Ant
Table 1.1. The release history of Ant. Major revisions come out every one to two years; minor revisions release every three to six months.
Chapter 2. A first Ant build
Table 2.1. The initial steps to building and running a program
Table 2.2. An Ant project should split source files, compiled classes files, and distribution packages into separate directories. This makes them much easier to manage during the build process.
Table 2.3. Ant command-line options
Chapter 3. Understanding Ant datatypes and properties
Table 3.1. Sun’s javac compared to Ant’s wrapper <javac> task. Note the similarities between the parameters. Also note Ant’s way of using domain-specific terminology for concepts such as classpath.
Table 3.2. Patternset attributes. Including and excluding patterns allows filesets to be defined precisely to encompass only the files desired.
Table 3.3. Default exclude patterns, which are used in filesets to match files that aren’t used, copied or deleted by default. If you want to add files that match these patterns to a fileset, then set defaultexcludes="no".
Table 3.4. Ant’s built-in selectors. Any fileset can be restricted by these selectors to choose only those files that match the specific tests.
Table 3.5. Ant’s built-in properties. Build files can rely on these being set, although sometimes IDE-hosted Ant runs can find that this isn’t always the case.