Practical Dependency Management - A Field Guide

Dependency management has a habit of behaving just well enough to lull you into trusting it — right up until it doesn't. Practical Dependency Resolution: A Field Guide by Steve Poole and Hervé Boutemy is built for experienced Java developers, tech leads, and platform engineers who are done being surprised. Written as a series of real-world scenarios across Maven, Gradle, and SBT, this guide doesn't just tell you what to do — it explains the mechanical rules your build tools actually follow, including what happens when EOL dependencies meet time, policy, and operational reality. The result is the mental model you needed ten dependency conflicts ago.