Customer Reviews

Pro Spring 2.5 (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

I found this book to be rather confusing. The relevant parts for my needs seem to be as inadequately expressed as the same material on the Spring web site. I was hoping to find a book that provided clarity instead of more confusion. The best use of this book would be as a source of different perspectives on specific topics you're reading about in another book.

Technical documentation of spring framework components, their usage and API accordingly to integration technology areas IoC, AOP, persistence, remoting, testing, web, etc. The book is suitable for those who'd like to not only use but also know spring technology in deeper details, which are hidden behind scene of more convenient higher level API exposed to common developer via XML configuration tags, annotations or few java interfaces. The book is written by many authors and it's iterative effort over certain time and thus quality of particular chapters differ significantly. It's quite big in size containing lot of examples with repetitive code, errors, which made it hard to read and still stay fresh and wondering about what comes next. Despite it's size not all major integration technologies are covered e.g. remoting doesn't cover integration via JMS. I wouldn't recommend the book for the concept oriented readers - eagles who prefer top down approach in finding right direction in unkown lands, as well as those who are thinking about preparation for the certification exam. It's definitely not replacement for the training course material rather it's supplement. Currently the book is quite outdated.

I am trying to type in the examples in chapter 2 and there are simple mistakes in the examples. Such as incorrect number of arguments to a method or they simply left out all the code for another class that should be present. I am not sure which it is. Either way, I just picked up this book today, i am going to try to return it. Also, they have u writing console apps for Spring.. WTF? I bought this hoping to learn spring for the web.. if this is how the book has started I don't even want to get into more complicated examples. Do not buy this book! And don't ignore all the poor reviews..

I don't understand why this book has gotten such poor reviews. I was apprehensive about buying it but I really needed a comprehensive Spring book. I am very happy with this book. Everything is described very thoroughly and clearly and the code examples are short and to the point. While the text appears very dense, I am breezing through the chapters due to the quality of the writing.

The number of pages and chapters may be daunting but the book is well organized, which allows you to pick out the chapters or sections relevant to your specific need.

Courtesy of Szymon Pacanowski from Szczecin JUG:

"Spring is an excellent framework that is becoming more and more popular. At first, I didn't know why there is so much commotion about it, but after I read this book I know. Dependency Injection that is so popular (everybody has their own - Google, Eclipse and others too), Inversion Of Control, Aspect-Oriented Programming, dynamic script language, Spring design patterns and a lot more.

At first, this book was quite confusing for me. I thought 'Hey! Do they think I know all there is to know about Spring ?!' and looked at different sources that are around web. When I get overall view about the problem and returned to this same thing in book, I now know what they were writing about. When I start reading the book with this pattern (book + different sources from web) I started to enjoy it.

At about half of the book I had idea 'Why not try to code what is in examples?' so I downloaded sources. Not all were working well, but by fixing them I got real overview how it looks to work on true development project in Spring (bugs ;-) ). It gives you understanding of how Spring works and what problems could occur (better during learning Spring than writing app with deadline). You could learn from this book, if you don't expect it will all be simple. In real life and real development it never is.

So to summarize, this book was massive disappointment (not so easy and straightforward as I expected), but I enjoyed it (I like to learn from bugs and in hard way - knowledge last longer before you forget) and recommend it to everyone that isn't afraid to get his hands dirty and don't mind real work. If you want to learn Spring in easy way take something from 'In Action' series. Simply it's like going back to school - they expect you'll done some work at home."

I don't usually write reviews but I have to write one for this book. Mainly because I think the rating this book get is misleading. It is a real shame if some one stayed away from this book by looking at the rating. If you need to work on Spring project and you need to know how Spring works inside out, this is the book for you. Just read the first a few chapters and I am sure you will be convinced.

"Pro Spring 2.5" is the first and the most comprehensive guide to Spring Framework 2.0 and 2.5. released till now. The book can be thought of as a continuation of "Pro Spring" but it is not as good as its predecessor. "Pro Spring 2.5" is still valuable if you plan to learn about Spring Framework as a whole. It has more than 900 pages and touches many topics related to Spring Framework and other technologies, like Spring WebFlow, DWR, AJAX and many more.

Beside presenting Spring basics, the book nicely covers many new features introduced in Spring 2.0 or Spring 2.5 like: dynamic language support, XML Schema-based configuration, Spring TestContext Framework, load-time weaving ,etc.
On the other side, "Pro Spring 2.5" has a dedicated chapters on JAVA EE 5 but it does not cover JMS or EJB at all!

The book is quite easy to read and understand. It provides a good, overall knowledge of nearly all areas of Spring Framework related topics. The weakest point of the book is sample source, since it has many typos and even compilation problems.