Thanks to Thomas Locher, Part One of “Maven: The Definitive Guide” has been translated to German. If you are interested in reading the eight translated chapters online, or if you want to download a PDF version of the German book, visit the online German Translation of Maven: The Definitive Guide. The following chapters have been translated to German.

Here’s a hint of the next steps for Maven: The Definitive Guide.  We’re translating the title to German.  Right now, we’ve got a single chapter available, but look for more content over the coming days. More information on the effort and the people behind the effort to follow. Once this translation is finished, we will have a full book in Chinese (thanks to the efforts of Juven Xu) and a full book in English.

Formatting Issues Fixed

Many of you have noticed that the book had some encoding issues over the past few days as we switched to the new look and feel.   These encoding issues would show up as “???” throughout the HTML content.   These issues were caused by the default encoding of the maven-resources-plugin.   We’re making heavy use of resource filtering when we publish the book; variables like Maven Version “2.0.9″ and the installation directory of Maven are captured in Maven Properties in a pom.xml, and we filter the DocBook XML in our book’s Maven build.   Unfortunately, I had overlooked the encoding setting for the Maven Resource Plugin, in addition to not specifying an escapeString. This had the unfortunate side-effect of expanding references to Maven properties within the text and outputting invalid characters in our markup.

These problems have been fixed (throughout the suite of Sonatype documents), by adding the encoding configuration and making sure that we have an escapeString.

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-resources-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>2.3</version>
  <configuration>
    <escapeString>\</escapeString>
    <encoding>UTF-8</encoding>
  </configuration>
</plugin>