<a href="http://www.developer.com/open/article.php/998241" rel="nofollow">http://www.developer.com/open/article.php/998241</a> gives a decent overview. <p>My tip is to also track versions of all prod deployments so you know which one was active in production when.
I was using ant, and hated it. What I do now is check in all code into subversion, then if it's ready for release, tag it, then check out the tag directly onto the production server.