I’ve been reading Maven: The Definitive Guide (affiliate link) as a Kindle eBook and finally got to the point of trying the first example project. The book had mentioned that maven might be installed on Mac OS X already (due to usage with some versions of XCode). Magically, it’s there:

So far, I like the book’s approach to Maven.  It evangelizes maven as a tool, but puts the purpose of Maven in context, and explains, “Why Maven?” as well as explaining that “Maven or Ant?” is the wrong question.

If you’re looking to download the files to complete the example Maven projects, they’ve moved from the URLs in the Kindle version of the book because Maven: The Definitive Guide has been split into two books, Maven by Example and Maven: The Complete Reference.

All the project examples can still be downloaded from a single zip file from the Maven by Example book. However, the chapter numbers are not the same in the Maven by Example book, and the folders in the examples are named by a chap-{title} convention.

Within the zip file:

• Chapter 4’s project (Simple Weather Application) (originally at http://www.sonatype.com/book/mvn-examples-1.0.zip or http://www.sonatype.com/book/mvn-examples-1.0.tar.gz) is now available in the zip file under:
• ch-custom/simple-weather
• Chapter 5’s project (Simple Web Application)
• ch-simple-web/simple-webapp