Customer Reviews

Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is almost identical to the Spring developer's guide available on the web site. They follow the same chapters and format, and provide little new information, maybe some code. But once you start to get into Spring and use it, you'll want a reference that is more in depth. With this book, you'll find yourself struggling to find the details by browsing google and javadocs all day. Pro Spring is a better book that gives you more insight into how Spring works. My background is providing a services interface layer for a J2EE portal. I'm not developing the MVC so I didn't pay attention to those parts of the book.

There are quite a few books on spring framework in the wild and since I have read every one of them, I take the privilege to say that this book is not the best among them.

If you are a beginner; please stay away from this book. If you already know spring and want to add to your knowledge, then read on.

I was eagerly awaiting this book for 2 reasons.
1. One of the co-authors is Rod Johnson (creator of spring)
2. Almost none of the spring books in the market covered Spring MVC well

I have read Rod's previous books (J2EE Design and Development && J2EE Development without EJB). Both of them are classics, and deservedly so. Naturally, I expected the same quality from this book as well. Sadly, my expectation was wrong, and this book comes nowhere close to the quality of his previous works. This might be partly because, he wrote only a couple of chapters.

Secondly, I anticipated some coverage of the forthcoming spring 2.0 release. I imagine, this is a reasonable expectation because, this book came very late to the market, and it would make sense to cover a few more new features. Sadly, nothing more than "spring 1.2" is covered.

Thirdly, though this book's TOC contains some impressive topics not covered by other books, (like Acegi security), the coverage is pretty shallow and not well written either. This is a very poor combination to learn an advanced concept. So, the chapter is there, just making the TOC impressive. I didn't gain much penetration into "Acegi Security" from that chapter.

Is the coverage of basics good? I don't think so. But, this is the only part; they have at least attempted some comprehensiveness.

As usual, Spring MVC receives second class treatment although 3 full chapters are dedicated to cover it. This is the same with almost all spring books in the market. So, if you want to understand the full power of Spring MVC then, I would recommend, full-fledged books like "Expert Spring MVC and Web flow".

Another annoying fact is that, the authors refer back to Rod's other 2 books for many important concepts, leaving the reader hanging in mid air, especially, if you are a beginner.

Last, but not the least, When I was reading a few advanced concepts from this book, I felt a lot like reading the spring online documentation. So, I went to the documentation to check if my intuition is correct. It comes as no surprise that, there was a good deal of copy-paste. This may not be a very bad thing, because today's technology books are merely a consolidation of online documentation with interesting examples, practical use-cases and some of the author's experience combined. So, this fact is acceptable, but, still, I wanted to point this out.

Overall, from my point of view, I didn't find any real value from this book. So, beginners stay away, but experienced may use it as a reference.

If you are looking for a definitive reference manual, and a guide on Spring 1.2 this book is it. Look no further.
This book has significant depth, and it will teach you, clarify or answer almost any question on any area of the current Spring relase (1.2).

It has a very thorough coverage of Spring MVC, Acegi, AOP, Persistance, Spring JDBC. It will make those still unconvinced about the Spring much more comfortable about using it.

Why I then gave it 4 and not 5 stars.
I would expect that authors of this book who happen to be an authors of the framework itself would go an extra mile and describe some major new features that are available but awaiting Spring 1.3 (like Spring WebFlow) release; I would expect them to be less skimpy on some major "hot off the press" features that are part of the Spring 1.2.2 such as transactional annotations.
(Yes, they are brand new, but these guys knew they were coming. They implemented them.)

That would completely differentiate this otherwise excellent book from the other books on the same subject.
Hard core Spring users who lived by so far by the reference manual available on the Spring's web site, and by support forums
will not find much new in this book.

The other book on this subject that I own and recommend is "Spring in Action".

This is the book I had been waiting for, taking off where Pro Spring by Harrop & Machacek left me. It is typical in that it gives short examples on the key Spring functionality, but it adds the Acegi Security System for Spring add-on module.

The primary advantage of this book is that it not only explains the Spring functionality, but also explains some of the decisions behind the various implementation options and, most importantly, gives best practice information and specific decision points to assist developers in choosing the right option for the situation.

The sample web application that finishes up the book is a re-write of the one in Rod Johnson's Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development. A good choice as it allows one to see not only how the framework has grown and matured, but that the architecture is maintainable.

Unlike other Wrox 'book by committee' offerings, this one is well organized, tight, and has a common writing style; probably a result of the team working together for so long.

Definitely a must have for intermediate Spring Developers!

That said, I have two caveats:
1. The book is not an introduction to Spring. If you are new to the framework, I recommend Pro Spring. Then get this one.
2. The book doesn't describe the architectural 'whys'. For that, I recommend Rod Johnson's Expert One-on-One offerings.

Very incomplete information and examples, the missing pieces being crucial. Overall, poorly and inaccurately written. The authors jump into details before giving the reader the context into which the details should fit. The examples are three-line snippets that fail miserable in showing how to put all the pieces together. Lots of features covered in very short sections that never explain how to use the framework to build a system from beginning to end. Only confused me and wasted my time. I'm at the point of giving up on Spring.

If you are developing with Spring Framework you should buy this book and keep it handy by your desk, as it is a deep complement for the reference manual.

This is an excellent book by Rod Johnson and some people at the core team who developed Spring, the excellent tool set for Java distributed applications. Even I have been developing many different sorts of programs and with a wide set of tools and languages for over 30 years, every time I reread any paragraph of this book, I learn a bit more.

If you want to learn what Spring is or if you are considering using it, then you should probably first read "Spring in Action" by Craig Walls and Ryan Breidenbach (Manning ed.) which as a recipies book helps introduce Spring concepts by example, or read "Pro Spring" by Rob Harrop and Jan Machacek (Apress ed.) which goes a bit slower with concepts and examples.

This is an excellent book, Rod Johnson and his crew explained not only "How"s but "Why"s about Springframework, which is important to people who have known the basics and would like to explore the thought process in those geek's heads.
I highly recommented this book to experienced Spring users. For people would like an introduction book, "Spring In Action" is good one to begin with, or get Johnson's "J2EE Development without EJB".
The only thing I don't lile about the book is that there is no code download (although it claimed you can download from Wrox site), and also there are typos in code, which I believe it is from Wrox not Johnson. Well, I wish Johnson could publish his future books with Addison Wesley. :-).

I think this is a book you would use as a reference for getting deeper into the understanding of concepts and being aware of the options for configuration and implemention of various aspects of the framework. But you would need to already understand the basics of Spring.

If you want a Spring tutorial that will help you start building Spring applications from basic concepts, especially if you are a beginner, you may struggle with this book. You get explanation of concepts and code snippets, but you may need to read other books and online articles that are written more in a tutorial style.

This book is TERRIBLE! Almost as bad as the Spring manual itself which doesn't surprise me because it was written by the same people.

Some examples give good detail but they are VERY hard to follow. For most things that I want to do, there is little or no examples.

For example, there is no mention of Acegi taglibs.

If you want a better book, try the Manning "Spring In Action" book. I have that one too and it is much, much better.

I bought this book reading the good reviews and with hope that I will get the needed knowledge about Spring framework. Although in some modules (IOC, AOP) the book is quite good and explains well the concepts, it lacks the concrete examples. The method used to explain the most complicated concepts makes them hard to understand without any other source of information.
I found a lot of unnecessary information while the book lacks the necessary explanations sometimes.