Pro Spring 2.5 (Books for Professionals by Professionals) [Paperback]

Jan Machacek (Author), Aleksa Vukotic (Author), Anirvan Chakraborty (Author), Jessica Ditt (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1590599217 | ISBN-13: 978-1590599211 | Publication Date: August 21, 2008 | Edition: 1

The open source agile lightweight Spring (meta) Framework 2.5 is by far the leading innovative force and “lightning rod” that’s driving today’s Java industry.

Spring has time and time again proven itself in real-world highly scalable enterprise settings such as banks and other financial institutions. These institutions, along with grid and other traditional Java vendors that supports them, are looking at Spring first, and have all but forgotten Java EE/J2EE.

Pro Spring 2.5 by Spring’s own Rob Harrop lets the reader experience a real application being built from the ground up with Spring using all the multiple Web views and frameworks (while other books may use only one). Pro Spring 2.5 will continue on the best selling success of Pro Spring.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jan Machacek is a chief software architect at Cake Solutions Limited (www.cakesolutions.net), a UK-based software company. He has been an early adopter of Spring at Cake Solutions and has seen the dramatic change the Spring framework has brought to the Java world. As part of his job, Jan designs and oversees the development of majority of Cake's projects. Where appropriate, Jan also applies his interest in declarative programming and artificial intelligence. Throughout his programming career, Jan has designed and implemented large J2EE and .NET systems for the UK government and large private sector bodies. When not programming, Jan enjoys foreign languages; he also enters races and time trials as a member of the Manchester Wheelers' cycling club.

Aleksa Vukotic is senior developer of Cake Solutions Limited. He joined Cake Solutions in June 2004. Since joining Cake, Aleksa has worked on numerous Java projects using the Spring framework for variety of clients. His work includes sophisticated systems for the UK government agencies. As part of his role at Cake, Aleksa helps other members of the team with some of the most complex problems, especially related to data access and MVC. He graduated in computer science and engineering at the School of Electrical Engineering, Belgrade University, Serbia. In his spare time, Aleksa enjoys nights out and computer games.

Anirvan Chakraborty is a developer at Cake Solutions Limited. Since becoming a member of the Cake team in 2006, Anirvan has worked on the more complex projects, including the UK government knowledge management system. Anirvan is a contributor to Lucene integration in the Spring Modules project. Prior to joining Cake, Anirvan completed his master’s degree in Internet software systems at the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. When not programming, Anirvan enjoys following sports like Cricket and Formula One. He also enjoys reading detective novels and watching movies.

Jessica Ditt is a developer at Cake Solutions Limited. She joined the Cake team in 2005 and has worked on numerous enterprise-level projects, all of which were written using the Spring framework. Jessica has been an early adopter of Spring Webflow at Cake and has become an expert in efficient indexing using Lucene and monitoring deployed systems using JMX. Out of the office, Jessica is a keen volleyball player.

Product Details

• Paperback: 920 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (August 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590599217
• ISBN-13: 978-1590599211
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #865,255 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Poorly Written Spring Book, October 17, 2008

By 

George Jiang (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Pro Spring 2.5 (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)

This is the worst Spring book I have read so far. Spring in Action 2nd Edition is much more readable and easier to understand, though that book covers Spring 2.0.

For Spring 2.5, Spring Recipes is far more comprehensive, accurate and up to date than this book. E.g., the @Autowired annotation is only mentioned on page 67. No further explanation. The @Repository, annotation is not explained correctly on page 409, giving the wrong impression that dependencies in a class annotated with @Repository are autowired/auto-satisfied.

There are also many information gaps in this book, readers will need to consult SpringSource documentation from time to time when reading this book. E.g., in chapter 17 Spring MVC, there is no description as where to put the context definitions (by default, if the DispactcherServlet is named xyz in web.xml, Spring will look for the associated context definition file at /WEB-INF/xyz-servlet.xml).

Either accidentally or deliberately, the authors seems to shy away from covering Spring's support for non-SE Java EE technologies such as JNDI, JMS, JPA, JSF, EJB2, or EJB3 annotations such as @Resource. The only EE technologies covered are JTA (via Spring transaction management) and Servlet (via Spring MVC).

Even with many critical information missing and many subjects not covered, the book is still bloated to over 900 pages with a lot of confusing and useless text.

I definitely won't buy Pro Spring 3.0 from the same authors.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Waste of money, poorly written, February 9, 2009

By 

Mike Z - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pro Spring 2.5 (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)

I ignored the reviews and decided to purchase this book anyways. What a mistake. The book is poorly written with incomplete examples riddled with errors. I tried downloading the code samples from the web site to follow along and very few worked. Stick to the "..In Action" series. These are written much better, and more reasonably priced. Lessons learned!

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Crisp writing with a discovery style of writing - Best book on Spring, May 2, 2010

By 

Srikanth Krishna Shenoy (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pro Spring 2.5 (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)

I am surprised by a lot of poor reviews of this book.
I like the Spring in Action book, but I like this book better (much much better)

First of all, the authors of this book take a discovery approach to introducing topics one after another.
They lay out a problem, its solution and how Spring can solve the problem well.
This approach exercises your brain, makes one think logicallywhile reading this book and finally appreciate the concept well.

Compare this with the Spring in Action book, which definitely makes for a light-read.
I could sit in a airport with lots of noise around me still manage to read the book and capture the concept to a certain extent
With light-read comes a certain baggage. It will tell you "what" and "how".
The concepts are not cemented well in the brain because a lots of "whys" are left unanswered.

To each his own style of reading.
If you are the kind who likes to do light reading and go light on details and are satisfied with "what" and "how" and can keep going without the "why"s answered
(and the IT industry is full of recipe oriented people), then Spring in Action is great for you.
Otherwise pick this book.
This is not to belittle the Spring in Action book. I am a avid reader and also author of technical books.
I am gone through both books.
I hate it when authors use different code examples to describe different concepts.
And I dont like to read through long examples describing Monty Python or rules of some arcane game when I want to understand a technology.
I want crisp and compact examples and I want the book to answer the questions arising in mind (as if they are reading my mind)
This book does it well.