Sonatype books are different.

We publish an updated version of the book each time there has been a change in the product it describes. This means that when you come to Sonatype to download a book on Nexus, Maven, or m2eclipse, you will be getting today’s book, up-to-date with the latest content.

Click your favourite book title for the latest copy:

Maven by Example

This book is an introduction to Apache Maven. It introduces the central concepts of Maven by building up a sample multi-module Maven project which involves an object model, a database, a set of services, and a web application.

Maven: The Complete Reference

This book is an essential reference for anyone working with Apache Maven. This book explores the details of the POM, Maven Settings, Maven Archetypes, and many other topics.

Repository Management with Nexus

Repository managers serve two purposes: they act as highly configurable proxies between your organization and the public Maven repositories and they also provide an organization with a deployment destination for your own generated artifacts. “Repository Management with Nexus” will walk you through the installation process for both the Open Source version of Nexus and Nexus Professional.

Developing with Eclipse and Maven

The m2eclipse plugin is fully documented in the free, online book Developing with Eclipse and Maven. This book covers the installation and configuration of the plugin as well as detailing some of the procedures you can use.

Mark de Visser: Our publisher, O’Reilly, has been an invaluable part of the success of Maven: The Definitive Guide. When you write a book, you usually deliver a product to the production department of a publisher and that publisher prints a few thousand copies which are distributed to a network of book sellers and intermediaries. Once you deliver the manuscript, both the content and the community are out of your hands. This “dead-tree model” of publishing is as antiquated as it is impersonal, and, with the Maven book, we saw a chance to break the cycle and work with a publisher like O’Reilly who is very open to the idea of publishing a freely available book. Our editor, Mike Loukides, wasn’t hesitant at all to agree to publish a free book and talked about the success they have had with books like the Subversion book and the Asterisk book, both of which were free but generated a great deal of print sales. We will jointly evaluate options to deliver print-on-demand versions of the print books, which match closer to the dynamic nature of our constantly updated online books.

Read more of Galoppini’s Interview at his blog “Commercial Open Source Software”

Not only are we interested in pursuing less traditional avenues such as print-on-demand, we’re currently evaluating some of the more open electronic book formats such as ePub. Since our documentation is written in the DocBook XML format, there are some fairly straightforward open source projects designed to create ePub output from a standard DocBook or DITA document. Stay tuned.