Saturday, November 18, 2006

The Buildmeister's Guide

I received a copy of the book The Buildmeister's Guide: How to design and implement the right software build and release process for your environment, by Kevin A. Lee, who runs www.buildmeister.com (the book is also available on Amazon.com).

I really liked Kevin's earlier book on ClearCase, Ant and CruiseControl: The Java Developer's Guide to Accelerating and Automating the Build Process. Even though it was specific to ClearCase it had a lot of really good information in general about build/release process automation. The Buildmeister's Guide "builds" on that (no pun intended) and covers build automation tools (such as CruiseControl and BuildForge) as well as Version Control in general (including tool selection and branching/merging policies). It also covers more than just Java, and has sections on other language & environment factors like .NET and C++.

All in all, it looks like a very good, and short (~110 pages) guide for beginning and intermediate build-meisters to learn a whole lot more about effective practices, resources and tools for software building and releasing.

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