“Pragmatic Project Automation” does a good job of introducing us to the world of continuous software integration. It covers all aspects of the software lifecycle, mainly focusing on the build, deployment and monitoring. You will learn how to organize your software release process so as to utilize a number of automatic tools, services and techniques.
The end result should be a process where a large number of human errors during deployment would be caught or avoided, gaining better confidence in what has been released.
Technologies used in this book are: Java, Ant, CruiseControl, scripting, JUnit. There is talk of Maven, but I guess that it was not yet as prominent in 2004 as it is today. The same techniques can easily be applied to .NET, PHP, Python or any other development environment.
Since most examples assume a website for a project, I wish that there would be a section on how a client-server app with a database would fit this model.
One thing that I find awkward is the choice of Version Control, it is still CVS. This book was published in 2004, when SVN has already showed its superiority over CVS.
This book does contain everything one need to know to start using project automation at your shop. I would recommend a place on developer’s bookshelf for this book.
P.S. This book is still not available on Kindle. :(
