Project Automation

I just finished reading Pragmatic Project Automation (How to Build, Deploy and Monitor Java Applications) written by Mike Clark.

This book is very well written and an easy read. I picked it from the shelf in our Atlassian library two months ago. I read it mostly in the mornings and evenings on the train commuting to the office. I must say that even my trips take only 20 minutes, in those 20 minutes I managed to read just enough to get me started thinking about software processes that we have in place and how to improve them.

There were many things in the book that I was quite familiar with. I have already used Ant, written unit tests, created scripts that build new releases. Although I was familiar with many of these aspects of project automation, there were new ideas, other angles of application of the automated processes I've never thought about. I was quite interested in reading the chapters dedicated to installation, deployment and monitoring. I have faced the dilemmas of these stages of software development and I was quite curious to find out how the author solved them.

This book is truly inspirational. In a sense it is a cook book for project automation. It's easy to follow and proves useful to a novice as well as experienced developer.

I will put this book back on the shelf in our office. It's worth sharing and I will highly recommend reading it to anybody who wants to automate almost anything in software development.