Productive Environments - Eric Foster-Johnson has a number of excellent introductory tips on using IDEs, Ant, unit testing and more. A couple of notes:
- I don't think Ant is across-the-board faster than make: I think it can compile Java faster than make, but IME other tasks are slower.
- You don't need to implement a "-help" target since Ant includes a 'projecthelp' switch that lists all the targets in alphabetical order, plus the contents of the "description" attribute of each.
Great job!