I've finished a quick production update of John Casey's original Maven Assemblies chapter in Maven: The Definitive Guide. This chapter provides a great deal of information about the Maven Assembly plugin and has some recommendations and best practices. Check it out, and send any feedback to book@sonatype.com.
This chapter is massive, and it took me a surprisingly long time to process John's original chapter. John wrote the original in a Pages document that was something like 50+ pages in length. I had to copy the whole thing to XMLMind and translate it to the super-fancy, annotated, xref, example-ridden DocBook XML format.
As I went, I rearranged a few things, rewrote a bunch of copy, and tried to add what I could to support John's original content. The end product is a chapter that leaves very little unexplored wrt Assemblies. Read it, review it, send your feedback to book@sonatype.com.