Customer Reviews

Spring in Action

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I purchased this book to learn Spring. I was looking for a book that would plainly explain the reason for Spring, its benefit as a framework and provide clear examples of how to implement Spring in my projects.

The authors do a satisfactory job explaining the need for Spring, it's history and its impact on alleviating code-dependencies. The examples are simple and easy to understand, overall. The authors fail, however, to clearly demonstrate how Spring is implemented. The examples are verbose with partial file listings. For example, I would like to know more about the framework context. The authors show snippets of XML code but do not show entire files or adequately explain how the files are related to the framework. The source code example is incomplete. Its missing dependencies and there is no explanation what they may be. I spent 30 mins searching then gave up.

"Spring in Action" discusses implementing Spring with Struts, iBatis, Hibernate and some other frameworks in a failrly detailed manner.

Overall I would say the book is OK but not concise.

(Sorry for my english, I'm spanish)

After reading not just a few scientific books, I must say that I find a real pleasure to learn with this one.

It has the perfect pace while going into depth. Also, it has lots of short and easy to understand examples.

It's so well written, I mean, a decent journalist in the culture section of a newspaper would like to have some of Craig Walls skills.

I don't want to reveal much of the content, but I must say that many of the examples are thouhgt with a lot of imagination, sense of humor and pedadogy. I've found myself laughing a few sometimes with those examples... what a great way to learn.

Good job Craig.

While this is a pretty good book with a few irritations (of which no technical book lacks) you should not buy this book unless you have legacy code to support. The 3rd edition is just being released as I speak. I bought the 2nd edition not knowing that the new edition was in the wings. I won't die but I wish I had known.

The author gives an excellent overview over the technologies covered by Spring and goes into sufficient depth and deeper where needed. The basic principles of dependency injection and aspect oriented programming and their specific support by Spring are explained in detail before going into the areas of programming covered by Spring: enterprise orientated Spring for servers (persistency, transactions, security, remote communication support, web services, EJB integration and further stuff), Spring MVC and the very elegant Web Flow programming for the rather client orientated side.
One has the freedom to read one chapter but to rather skip the other and the book is free of the burden of an all-encompassing basic example. Examples are good and rich and detailed but not overdetailed. Moreover, the author is an excellent didactician who knows to pose the right questions to be answered. An intellectual delight, too. One understands what Spring is and how it excels in difference to the more basic JEE. Plenty of furthergoing material is contained, too, e.g., aspects of integration with other frameworks.

Best overall introduction to Spring 2.0 and higher. Use it with Gary Mak's Spring Recipes. The chapters on Spring Web Services and Spring Security are alone worth the price of admission.

The Spring Framework comes with some good documentation, so what does this book offer beyond that? The examples in this book are a bit more fleshed out (though not to the point where you have pages with nothing but code samples), and there are some forays beyond the core Spring Framework (e.g. Spring Security and Spring Modules). It's well written but don't expect to find much that isn't in the free documentation, which is a bit more detailed in general. The biggest issue at the time of the writing of this review is that the book is outdated: The examples may still work, but e.g. Spring MVC has some substantial simplifications in Spring 2.5, and Spring 3.0 is not far off, either, so I'd wait for the 3rd edition of this book.

I bought this primarily to know about Dependency Injection and the book explains it clearly and in a easy to understand way with test cases and code snippets.

I bought this book because my Java teacher told me so. I usually read a lot of reviews before buy some technical book. This one wasn't the case.

This book is good, a very funny reading, but you must to read most part of it if you want to jump some pages and get a chunk of material in the middle pages. I was searching for Spring and JSF integration but the chapter begins with "Imagine that before you had ever heard of Spring, you had already developed the RoadRantz application using JSF in the web layer." Well, is easy to see that I didn't developed the "RoadRantz" application because I just want to look at JSF and Spring working together.

This book is not good for quick consult. You must read it all. That's why I wrote "it could be better" if the author just give a single example for each chapter instead wire all book's examples up.

I've managed to get through the first six chapters in two weeks. Although the writing style is readable for a technical book there is a glaring lack of examples other than dangling code snippets that show how to actually use Spring. The code I downloaded from the book's web site is largely incoherent and undocumented.

I did manage to find several online tutorials that have been a lot more help. I recommend finding one that you like before attempting to wade past the first four chapters.

When I first tried to learn about Sring it was very painful to get through the first chapter. Maybe it was because I was too inexperienced about java and web development in general. Now that my career depends on me learning this material I settled down and started trying to understand what Spring is about. I also tried several online tutorials on Spring to get me familiar with the how Spring is setup in IDE.
With that said, I was able to learn about dependency injection and AOP in the first chapter. The author actually does try to hold your hand and walk you through a rather inverted concept. He does use a "Hello World" example in as simple a manner as possible with Spring, to demonstrate some very basic concepts of Spring. The next code example on the Knights of the Round Table actually solidified my learning even more. One will have to do the code and do some thinking for yourself to get it to compile on your IDE. Painful yes, but it forces you to really understand what is going on.
Don't expect Spring concepts to jump out at you. It is a very different way of thinking than what you are used to.
I may re-evaluste my review later as I am just starting Chapter 3.