None of the books/documents I've read until now explains Maven like this book. The style and the approach of showing through examples are great. But the example codes are full of errors. It shadows the quality of the maerial.

This is a Maven book right? Not a java book. So if you want to learn the details of Maven in an iterative approach you'd follow the examples. It's best when you don't use an IDE as all IDEs to some degree hide Maven details and you cannot get the essence of it without writing mvn at the command line. The problem is the sample code are full of stupid errors. As if they were not even compiled. Such as passing String to a method expecting and integer, wrong package names. Things that really should have not been in the book.

Therefore I rate this 5 star book as 3 because of the loss of time it caused to me fixing and submitting errata.

I have been skirting the edge of Apache Maven for about 3-4 years now. Maven 1.x was an utter disaster for me to wrap my head around. Maven 2.x is a whole different animal that rapidly allows a developer to begin and configure a project.

The great thing about this book is the explanation of the property management, dependency management & configuration, and overall interrelation of the Project Object Model (POM).

The down side is the coverage on external settings and profiles (settings.xml and profiles.xml) ... They don't work the way described in the book.

Overall great book to have on the shelf in the library.