"Extending Ant" goes beyond that, showing how to enhance Ant itself if the need ever arises. "Writing Custom Tasks" covers Ant's plug-in model, including task life cycle, plug-in structure, and coding examples. Chapters 10, "Writing Custom Tasks," and 11, "Extending Ant," introduce the process of customizing Ant when what is provided out of the box is inadequate. These chapters could also be considered collections of best practices, while chapter 9, "Using Ant in Large Projects," aims to educate the reader on the best way to tailor Ant declarative programming for scalability. The following four chapters-"Building a Project," "Deploying an Application," "Running an Application," and "Testing an Application"-are a combination of user guide and cookbook styles, including customizable Ant recipes for various tasks. Part of chapter 3, and chapter 4, "Examining Ant's Types," read somewhat more like a reference, elaborating in great detail on certain configuration behaviors using a very dry and analytical style. The first two chapters, "Introducing Ant" and "Installing Ant," and to a lesser extent the third, "Using Ant," are written as tutorials, and are at times a little overbearing for a book with "Pro" in the title. To an extent, the book seems to suffer from a bit of an identity crisis, perhaps for good reason.
The book covers its main use as a build tool extensively, as well as Ant's not-as-popular features related to extensibility and access via its programmatic application programming interface (API). Its most popular use is by means of declarative programming, where its build files are expressed in Extensible Markup Language (XML). Ant is an extensible software build tool written in Java.
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