I don't like maven, and thus I don't like this book too much. The book is somehow old, and there are not many new books, so I guess it is still a must read if you have to work with maven, however reading this book will not make you an expert, but it is a first step.
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Good explanation of what's going on in Maven. Code samples are horrible unfinished. Many won't work without some tweaking. You can get the code samples either from downloading the sample code as a whole zip file archive, or you can get each example on a case by case basis with the maven archetype plugin. The book recommends that you use the archetype, but the code generated by the archetype is the broken code. I'm not sure, but I think you can generally fix the broken code produced by the archetype by comparing it to the code from the archive.

The solution is not to avoid the use of the archetype -- that is a core tool to learn for using maven. The solution is to just fix them each time. No fun, but a not without out learning opportunities.

Again, the book is well written and provides a good introduction to a key Java developers tool. It's unfortunate the sample code doesn't work out of the box. ( )