Maven Crash Course: Step-by-Step Introduction for Beginners

The Maven Crash Course is designed to cut academic theory to just the key concepts and focus on basics tasks in Maven in order to be productive quickly. The lessons and examples provided are delivered in a step-by-step, detailed way to ensure mastery of the skills and topics covered.

Course Outline

Introduction walks through the course goals, approach and then define Maven.

After just a little bit of Theory in Core Concepts, we step through Maven Installation on Windows and Mac OS X.

In Setup and Getting Help, we cover how to ask for help in Maven. We also download the course working files on GitHub.

After the setup and installation of Maven, we get hands-on in Getting Started as we create our first Maven project -- keeping it simple with a minimal demo. Maven Basics covers additional concepts. The concepts are continued in Beyond the Basics as we look into dependencies, repositories and plugins within Maven. Then we improve our project by Unit Testing -- where we add JUnit tests, deal with (and avoid) testing failures. Finally, the last section of the main part of this course is dedicated to running Maven within Eclipse using the M2Eclipse plugin.

During the entire course, we get into a habit of saving our changes periodically using Git source control.

Finally, the Bonus section provides some extra lessons to compliment the course and add value. These lesson are non-critical and thus don't belong in the main part of the course.

Course Features

Presentations provide audio/video training of conceptual ideas. Since few like slide-ware presentations, slide-presentations are kept to a minimum (about 20 minutes).

Over 2 hours of Screencasts provide a video of the instructor's computer system with any actions, commands, or screens displayed and narrated.

At the end of each section containing command line interaction, Command Listing lectures that serve as reference and reminder of the commands used in the previous lecture(s). Each Command Listing includes the exact listings used in the previous lectures. All commands used in this course are available through the Command Listing lectures.

The Quizzes at the end of each section reinforce the key concepts by testing your newly learned knowledge throughout the course.

Project files and examples are all available on GitHub.