I’ve been working with Maven a lot lately. One of my current projects involved migrating a complex Ant build to Maven using multiple modules, a ton of dependencies, and integration with a private remote repository hosted at Unfuddle (See: Subversion Help – Books, Plugins, and Hosting).
This book: Maven: The Definitive Guide has been indispensable throughout. In addition to the hardcopy, the folks at Sonatype are also maintaining an HTML and PDF version here.
If you’re presented with a similarly challenging enterprise grade Maven project, be sure to check out the best practices and recommendations in: Chapter 7. Multi-module Enterprise Project.
A quick note on accessing secured remote repositories
Find your settings.xml configuration file:
C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\.m2\settings.xml
Add the following entry with your username/password credentials:
<!-- servers
| This is a list of authentication profiles, keyed by the server-id used within the system.
| Authentication profiles can be used whenever maven must make a connection to a remote server.
|-->
<servers>
<server>
<id>yourrepoid</id>
<username>yourusername</username>
<password>password123</password>
</server>
</servers>