Installing ANT 1.5.3 --Better than the previous post

Question

Hello all,
I am a RIT student on my first internship an I'm in over my head. (At least that the way I'm told all first internships feel) Anyway, I am trying to install Apache's POI jar files into my JVM, so that I can easily read and write Excel files. The POI installation says that I need to install two components; ANT as well as FORREST. Below I have pasted some lines from the ANT 1.5.3 installation documentation, of which I have tagged with a few questions. The bold type followed by a Q# shows where I am getting caught up.
<Install Document>
Installing Ant
The binary distribution of Ant consists of the following directory layout:
ant
+--- bin  // contains launcher scripts
|
+--- lib  // contains Ant jars plus necessary dependencies
|
+--- docs // contains documentation
| +--- ant2    // a brief description of ant2 requirements
| |
| +--- images  // various logos for html documentation
| |
| +--- manual  // Ant documentation (a must read ;-)
|
+--- etc // contains xsl goodies to:
// - create an enhanced report from xml output of various tasks.
// - migrate your build files and get rid of 'deprecated' warning
// - ... and more ;-)
Only the bin and lib directories are required to run Ant. To install Ant, choose a directory and copy the distribution file there. [Q1] This directory will be known as ANT_HOME.
Windows 95, Windows 98 & Windows ME Note:
On these systems, the script used to launch Ant will have problems if ANT_HOME is a long filename (i.e. a filename which is not of the format known as "8.3"). This is due to limitations in the OS's handling of the "for" batch-file statement. It is recommended, therefore, that Ant be installed in a short, 8.3 path, such as C:\Ant.
On these systems you will also need to configure more environment space to cater for the environment variables used in the Ant lauch script. To do this, you will need to add or update the following line in the config.sys file
shell=c:\command.com c:\ /p /e:32768 I can do this one ;-)
Setup
Before you can run ant there is some additional set up you will need to do:
Add the bin directory to your path. [Q2]
Set the ANT_HOME environment variable[Q3] to the directory where you installed Ant. On some operating systems the ant wrapper scripts can guess ANT_HOME (Unix dialects and Windows NT/2000) - but it is better to not rely on this behavior.
Optionally, set the JAVA_HOME environment variable (see the Advanced section below). This should be set to the directory where your JDK is installed.
Note: Do not install Ant's ant.jar file into the lib/ext directory of the JDK/JRE. Ant is an application, whilst the extension directory is intended for JDK extensions. In particular there are security restrictions on the classes which may be loaded by an extension.
</Install Document>
Questions
Q1: What is this distrobution File? -- If the directory contents are needed to answer this one, then just perhaps a brief description of what to look for (file extentions or name or somthing) would suffice.
Q2: Add the bin directory to your path. Ok so how would I do this?
Q3: Set the ANT_HOME environment variable... How can I do this?

Answer 1

1) What you downloaded should be a packed file (zip, tar.gz, etc) that needs to be unpacked into the directory of your choice.
2) & 3) are answered by Ant's installation documentation (the page you're quoting from):
http://ant.apache.org/manual/index.html