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97 of 106 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good idea, bad execution, August 3, 2006
This review is from: Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse (Paperback)
I bought Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse just because I buy a lot of books. The idea behind it looked very nice. Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse form a very good development platform. I already knew this much. I had even used all of them, but I can always learn more.
The book is, according to the author, based on the development of an example project which is also a very good idea.
The problems begin when transforming those ideas into the reality of a book.
For starters, the book is poorly written/edited. The author gets ahead of himself a lot. "We'll see more on this later" - he says, and later can be a good eight to ten pages. Section and subsection titles seem to have random importance and chapters are strangely structured, as if you were listening to a presentation where the speaker hadn't bothered to order things.
"Now, I will explain this", "Now, I'll do that"... "Oh, and by the way, I hadn't said anything about this other thing. I'll mention it now even if it doesn't fit here".
The next *big* problem is the code. The book relies a lot on the code, but instead of inserting the code within context, it just comments a couple of selected lines and you're expected to follow along with the downloaded code on your computer.
This is a big turn off for me. I don't usually read books by the computer.
Then there's that thing about the author. Don't get me wrong. This is the first I've read from Mr. Hemrajani but I'm sure he's a great developer. But a good book, more so a book like this, should be about Agile Development, about Java, about Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse.
Sure, I do like an author who can express and convey his own views and opinions, his experience and know-how. But reading this, there's a feeling that this is all only about how _he_ does this or that. There're too many mentions on "this particular piece I wrote years ago about...", too many self-references and details which ultimately do not seem to be all that relevant.
To sum it up: The idea is very good, and you may still get good bits from the book. But it *needs* a very thorough re-write and editing work.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Mixed Bag of Info...., January 8, 2007
This review is from: Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse (Paperback)
Like a lot of other reviewers on Amazon - I was disappointed by this book. Granted -- its going to be difficult to cover multiple major topics like Spring, Hibernate, and Eclipse all in a single book...but this one tries.
I enjoyed Anil's stories about his real-world experience with Java technologies. But the level of detail in the book ranges wildly from 50,000 feet to 10 feet. At times, he is flying over concepts so quickly - its hard to realize they are important (ex: JUnit), and at other times, he gives step-by-step mouse clicks through an eclipse wizard as if the reader is a Freshman in High School.
I'm a software developer - and have been using eclipse for 4 years - and I never needed a manual to figure out how to use eclipse. I did however, need to read online docs and books in order to use the Spring Framework, Hibernate, and other topics such as Ant and JUnit effectively.
This book balances concepts differently than I expected. For example, the book spends 53 pages on Eclipse (chapter 8), but only 16 pages to Spring core (chapter 6), 34 pages to Spring MVC (chapter 7), and 32 pages to Hibernate.
He also categorizes Logging (log4j and JDK logging), and eclipse debugging (yes, even more pages about eclipse!) as "Advanced Features"
Personally - I find his distribution of coverage completely inverse to what a reader would expect. There's just too much time spent on no-brainer topics, and not enough time spent on real-world topics (hibernate, spring, junit). Counting pages isn't exactly a scientific way to review a book -- but it gives you a good idea of what the author was choosing to emphasize.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Jack of three technologies, Master of none, July 4, 2006
This review is from: Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse (Paperback)
Agile Java Development would seem to be the natural successor to 2004's "J2EE Development without EJB". That volume's author, Rod Johnson, the creator of Spring, even contributes a one page forward to Anil Hemrajani's 2006 effort. "Agile Java Development" however is at best a "lite" version of it's predecessor. 300 pages just cannot do the topics justice; Mr Johnson' book was 500 pages and the current volume could have benefited from some more meat. There are very few source code examples in the book and while this is arguably better than page after page of code, it however crippled the book's usefulness when read while travelling and away from an internet connection.
Of the three technologies covered, Spring, Hibernate & Eclipse, I have the least experience with Hibernate, and even after finishing this volume, I feel like I know almost nothing about it. With regard to Eclipse, this book's coverage is significantly deficient when compared to just the 60-page first chapter of the second edition of "Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins." Lest that comparison seem unfair, in a volume as slim as "Agile Java Development", the author more than once commits the cardinal sin of repetition. Sure I learned about a couple of useful keystroke shortcut combinations for Eclipse, but I certainly didn't need to read about them twice in a 300-page volume.
This volume at best provides the barest of overviews of the covered technologies and processes, and is best suited for junior developers and managers.
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