Customer Reviews

Spring: A Developer's Notebook

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

 

 

I'm the author of this book, and I'm writing myself a one star review because you're all right, and you deserve to know what I'm doing about it. We pushed out a book before it was ready, and let way too many errors go undiscovered. My co-author, Justin Gehtland's blog chronicles the experience well. Let me tell you what we're doing so it doesn't happen again.

* We've just worked on a reprinting of this book with the great folks at O'Reilly.

* We've invested more time in the reprinting than we invested in pushing the book out to production the first time.

* O'Reilly has paid for independent reviewers to make sure that we have the code and content rock solid.

* O'Reilly has eaten the remaining books in the original printing, and will use only the reprint.

* I've refrained from promoting the book in public, until the reprinting was under way. I made no announcement in the usual places, even my blog.

My appologies to all readers, and O'Reilly customers. I let you down. There's no other way to put it. This book's quality sucked. We were overconfident after the Jolt award, and pushed it out before it was ready. If you do happen to order it, make sure that you get the reprint.

After purchasing the disaster that was the original edition, I purchased the updated version based on two things: (1) O'Reilly's usual quality products and (2) the review on this site by the author Bruce Tate discussing the changes made to the updated edition.

Well, gee... this time they made it all the way to Example 1-10 before there was an error. Granted, it's a small, easy one ("RentABikeApp-context.xml" instead of "RentABike-context.xml"), but it's still an unforgivable error given the train-wreck of the first printing.

By Example 1-12 (the ant build.xml) there are calls to directories which are not defined in the example, and other code which (depending upon how your local environment is set up) will simply not work at all. This particular situation could have been fixed by (a) providing explicit instructions on Spring framework setup so that the examples will automagically work for all those using the book and (b) some simple proofreading of the code.

Nothing I have mentioned constitutes insurmountable problems for someone familiar with J2EE development and ant, but it is simply rude and terribly infuriating that the simplest examples in the "updated" version require debugging of the code printed in the book.

What led to the approval of this new version which is still fraught with issues? Was it laziness? Ineptitude? At this point I don't care. If they can't even get me through chapter one without the requirement that I fix their code, I give up. I wish I could give this zero stars, particularly after they KNEW of the problems with the initial printing.

Perhaps they can get it right by version 5 or 7... until then, find another Spring book.

I ordered this book directly from the publisher back in early June and discovered to my surprise that it was not in stock. Yet I had seen it in a number of brick and mortar stores in my area, so I contacted them and was told that bookstores were being told to pull the book from the shelves because the book had so many problems it was being reprinted.

However, a few weeks later I was still seeing the book on bookshelves at stores and when I asked about that the store folks indicated they had not received a recall notice. Who to believe?

I finally received my copy today in the mail. The only thing that indicates this is a different copy than the original printing is an "Updated" label in the top right hand corner of the cover page. Otherwise the ISBN number is the same, and it still says "April 2005, First Edition" in the printing history section. There is no indicator in the Preface section that the book was subject to a reprinting, which I think would have been appropriate, as well as an update in the printing history - after all, isn't that the point of a printing history section?

So look for "Updated" on the cover, and only buy that version!

I just finished this book the whole time wondering what I was missing since I didn't understand anything. Then I started Pro Spring by Rob Harrop. Pro Spring is so much better it's like night and day. Also there were too many errors and mistakes in A Developer's Notebook. I can't recommend this book since it's not even useful as a reference.

I agree with the previous low score comments concerning this book. Furthermore, the example code would very often reference Spring classes whose usage were not explained.

Before buying this book, I would recommend reviewing the errata page, on the O'Reilly site.

I question the ethics of publishing the Spring NoteBook; the justification may have been based on Mr. Tate having won the 15th annual Jolt award for his Better, Faster, Lighter Java book.

As an alternative Spring source, I suggest you read the Pro Spring reviews, or wait for June 20th, Rod Johnson book.

One key thing to remember about the O'Reilly Developer Notebook series ... be prepared to supplement your learning with other material. I knew this going into the new book on Spring, so I wasn't surprised that much of the information was brief. I did find that the book contained useful information and got me up to speed with Spring fairly quickly. I like the example driven nature of the Developer Notebook series.

Unfortunately, there's a downside. This book is littered with errors and typos and the examples presented are largely incomplete. (I'm compiling a list at the moment to submit to the errata page for the book at O'Reilly.) Also, do not go to the O'Reilly web site looking for the samples to download, they are available only on author Justin Gehtland's web site.

Ultimately, the book provides a good and very brief introduction to many elements of the Spring framework ... but prepare yourself for frustration after frustration when trying to get the examples working yourself.

(Yes, I have the updated version.)

This book was a complete waste of money. I was left feeling strongly that the authors understand neither Spring itself nor the "heavyweight" technologies which they compare it against; many of the statements made about EJB or Struts are simply false.

The book does an exceptionally poor job of explaining how the Spring framework should be used. The examples are not at all clear, and the text often appears to be meaningless. I find it hard to believe this book was reviewed at all.

After reading these reviews I wasn't going to buy a hard copy of this book not knowing which version I would get. Since I have access to Safari Text Books Online, I thought that this is where it would be easiest for O'Reilly to incorporate the fixes. Sadly, no. You have to click between the page you're on and the errata page (which, if printed, would take 8 pages) to manually incorporate the fixes.

I read 14 pages and more than half of codes have errors or typos.
I doubt if author understand th contents. He keeps in describing the feeling about programming. he does not explain about what it means, or how it works. Do not buy this book, it is waste of your money and time.

This is NOT like the other excellent books by Tate and Gehtland.

The foreward of the book promises to teach by example, but in the first chapter you discover that the examples are broken. After half a day just trying to get "example 1-4" working in Eclipse, I'm throwing in the towel.

I hope "Spring in Action" had a better quality check than this
"notebook".