ANT Forum

Hi everyone

Have any books on ANT developing come out yet? Can anyone recommend a title?

Generally, I find the official documentation sufficient but sometimes a bit too fragmented...

Googled it of course, but only found stuff on ... wait for it ... the insect and the Java software build system!

Thanx

     

I think you may have spotted a gap in the market there! I have never heard of any ANT/ANT+ books.

However we are working on developing the website to make it easier to work through our documentation. Have you already checked out the ANT Basics, Starting Your Project and ANT+ Basics pages? Do you have a particular way you would like us to string things together? And would you really prefer a book or a more interactive online format?

Opinions very welcome...

Thanks!      

Thanks for the interest!

When familiarizing myself with a new technology (or any topic for that matter), I personally like to start reading an introductory book first and then use what I've learned to sift through documentation and online information. That way I already have some understanding of what is what and what I need for my individual projects. Hence my question about ANT books.

However, I must say that I underestimated the ANT Developer pages. I simply bookmarked the documentation download page some time ago and didn't really bother to browse much of the rest of the site, thinking the PDFs would be all I'd need. Now I've realized that the online pages are a much better starting point and a big help in deciding which documents and sections are actually relevant for a certain person/project.

So I'd say it's actually pretty well stringed together already!


     

OK, that's good to know. Thanks!      

Kat Kent - 12 March 2013 02:01 PM

I think you may have spotted a gap in the market there! I have never heard of any ANT/ANT+ books.
...
Opinions very welcome...
Thanks!

I'm a complete newbie to ANT and am investigating it as technology for our projects. I have to say that I prefer the book route, too. I find that even with excellent online documentation, I get up to speed faster on a new platform and devkit if there's a good book to read first. It's worth the usually 50 USD or so and weekend. Often these books are written by authors unassociated with the company, but many are published by the company. You asked for opinions      

The developer documentation that you find on this web site is both comprehensive and concise. Introductory documents as well as in depth references are provided. I hardly ever found a company that provides such good documentation. There's a helpful set of software tools and source code as well. Should there be any open questions, you get nearly instanteneous help in the ANT forum.
So if you put aside your wish for a book and dive into what's available, you will not miss your book in the end.      

old_man_biking - 18 March 2013 07:45 AM

The developer documentation that you find on this web site is both comprehensive and concise. Introductory documents as well as in depth references are provided. I hardly ever found a company that provides such good documentation. There's a helpful set of software tools and source code as well. Should there be any open questions, you get nearly instanteneous help in the ANT forum.
So if you put aside your wish for a book and dive into what's available, you will not miss your book in the end.

I don't doubt that the documentation is comprehensive and concise, and I've certainly dove in. I was just responding to my preferred approach to learning a new technology, which I've done dozens of times over decades. It's a "for what it's worth" comment.      

I've always found working with existing working code the easiest to learn from then a book. Its much easier to modify it and look in the debugger to understand how things work in that way. For me, while the c# demo code works it feels like its taking shortcuts to make some of the demo code simpler. To me a good demo app would be able to fully do a task, for example show how to search for a hr strap to get the pairing information, then close that channel correctly and then connect to the strap again directly.

Also doesn't seem like there isn't much in the way of open source code to look through to learn from what others have already done. Also seems hard to share code as you need to have a network key for the code to work but aren't allowed to distribute it. Maybe have the ability for user submitted samples here so people can learn from other's code and not worry about embedded things like the network key? No point in everyone reinventing the wheel (or interpreting the wheel torque main data page )      

Thanks for all these comments. We're always looking for ways to improve, so it's good to know what's working and what else could be useful. The book / sample code sharing aren't things we could do overnight of course, but they can go on our "people would use these" list...

If we had a code sharing area:
1 - would you mostly post code?
2 - mostly read code to learn?
3 - mostly read code to critique implementations and help others learn?
4 - something else I haven't thought of?

What would be the key things what would make or break a code sharing forum as a place that you would use?
I'm thinking: File types allowed / ability to find files (maybe a tagging system would work) / a way to mark the quality of code / comments / privacy.

How much influence would this have on your likelihood of using ANT vs another technology? Same question for how likely you would recommend that others use ANT?
     

If I could post full source code somewhere else I probably would go though one of the other online sites for posting code as they are better setup for sharing code as that is their focus. I'm pretty sure that functionality isn't trivial so while it may be nice, I don't expect you to have that much functionality. So I'd be happy with a simple catagory based file share (like http://www.ticalc.org/pub/) just to not have it all in one big folder (say break out by language). The important part is the ability to replace an old version if the author updates it, the ability to comment on it, and the ability to upload anything (well, in that no restrictions on network keys or things we aren't allowed to distribute from the Adopter agreement)

Right now I'd be #2 since I just started (should be obvious based in my posts here....) but could post the code I'm currently working on when I'm done. I'm just working on a side project to be able to record HRV into a FIT file using a ant+ stick and a HR strap along with data from a concept2 rower. That way I could import the FIT file into firstbeat athlete so it can analyze the HRV info. So far I got it to read my HR, but still cleaning up handling some of the edge cases and haven't really figured out how a FIT file should be written as I need to spend more time with the documentation (just started). The sample c# code just writes out the header so not sure how to record the activity.

Anything that would make it easier to use Ant will increase my chance of using it. Would be nice if more cell phones supported it built in but have a feeling thats a much more complicated issue. Also would be nice if I could find a place to buy a ANTUSB-m stick that sells to individuals      

An example of good source code to help other developers can be shown here:
http://www.thisisant.com/forum/viewthread/3871/
Assuming you have full rights to the code why would you not share it so other developers can make use of the work already done?