best Ant tutorial / quickstart? [closed]

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After having avoided learning ant for far too long (IDEs and copy&paste make it easy for simple tasks) I now see myself forced to get into shape ASAP. Working on a big-ish project, it has become increasingly difficult to know what to copy and where to paste and not to break things along the way.

A search for ant tutorials and quickstarts yields literally thousands of results, so please share your experience - which one gets to the point fast and still is comprehensive?

I'm secretly hoping for something like the glorious hg开发者_开发技巧init tutorial. Does such a thing exist for ant?

EDIT : Looks like a big win for the official docs so far. Makes it quite difficult to pick an answer to accept as they are all so similar.

I have found a decent tutorial going beyond the basics of the official HelloWorld, featuring JUnit testing, reports and SVN checkouts here. But after completing I still have to turn to the docs for more.

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http://ant.apache.org/manual/tutorial-HelloWorldWithAnt.html is probably your best bet. It covers the basics enough to get your feet wet, then after that, you are really going to want to just dive into the manual http://ant.apache.org/manual/.

The problem you my face is that Ant is a script language (as opposed to a tool like mercurial), so it is more complicated and if you are not careful, you are likely to make a mess in the process. Not saying it's a bad tool, just don't pound out a ton of Ant script without reflecting on what you're doing every now and then.

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I think the best way for you to learn is by asking specific questions. Instead of copying/pasting without understanding what it is you will not learn much. Start working on a build.xml and when you get stuck ask questions here or at the chat gallery.

For what is worth I like the official ant tutorial. Also I have been using maven fairly exclusively for most of my projects now and that is also something worth considering if you have your team buy into on it.

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I think the Ant manual is the best place to start. I've been using Ant for years and I've never needed a book or tutorial.

http://ant.apache.org/manual/

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Personally I never find it and after one week of research I gave it away. I decided to learn getting my hands dirty and using the Ant Tasks help pages. It was not so difficult to get things done.