Customer Reviews

Spring Enterprise Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

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Courtesy of Sebastian Stolarczyk from Warszawa JUG:

After having read Gary Mak's first Spring book (Spring Recipes) I became a fan of both Spring Framework as well as the writing style of his. Gary explained Spring in a very informative and easy to follow manner. When "Spring Enterprise Recipes" came out I couldn't resist giving it a try - and I wasn't (that much) disappointed.

"Spring Enterprise Recipes", as the title goes, is targeted towards Java developers working on designing and implementing enterprise-class solutions with Spring Framework. The book begins with an introduction to Spring platform - it explains how to instantiate the IoC container, declare beans within it, and introduces some basic concepts, i.e. aspect oriented programming (AOP) with Spring.

The first chapter is a real crash course as it describes lots of things in just 60 pages. I have personally found it concise and easy to read, so even if you're not quite familiar with the technology at hand, you won't have much trouble grasping the basics. Altough I must admit that it feels kind of rushed (concepts were explained more slowly in the previous book of Gary "Spring Recipes"). Take AOP as an example - you jump into AOP right after only a few lines of explanation what it's supposed to solve. Not much, really.

In the next chapter the authors introduce what's new in Spring 3.0 (the latest version of framework). This part of the book, despite being part of the Recipes series, concentrates more on presenting the technology with examples being a little too abstract. On the other hand, this chapter does a good job on explaining what's new, especially if you're aware of how you have done things in the previous versions of Spring. After the first two chapters, things begin to be more problem-specific.

I basically liked the rest of the book, but I'm not that thrilled as I was after reading the first "Spring Recipes" book. What's great about "Spring Enterprise Recipes" is its formula. In each chapter you're introduced to a problem, and then the authors show you how to go about it from the very beginning to its end. The examples are simple, albeit they successfully address the core of the issue. As I said earlier, they are easy to follow even for a not-so-geek Spring programmer (assuming he/she understood the core concepts). Issues like transactions, data access, remoting, messaging and web services are all deeply covered. Personally I only didn't like the last two or three chapters (Distributed Spring, jBPM and OSGi); after reading them it felt a little incomplete - they were just introductions to very broad topics. What's interesting is the authors even suggest that you should get some additional books on these concepts. Besides that, they did explain what Spring has in stock to deal with those things, altough the benefits of using Spring in that areas weren't that obvious to me. Maybe if the authors spent some extra pages it would become clearer.

"Spring Enterprise Recipes" was a decent read, but not a must-have like "Spring Recipes". On the pro side: lots of recipes are generic enough to even copy and paste code fragments and use them in your work as a basis to begin coding, almost every issue you'll be facing at enterprise development is covered. You have to be aware however that this book is designed to address common enterprise issues (batch processing, integration, business process management), not web application programming with Spring (Spring MVC, REST). If you're interested in the latter, you should buy "Spring Recipes" first, or wait for "Spring Web Recipes". On the cons side: no web programming (which is also needed in enterprise environment!), some chapters seemed a bit rushed, and some left you hungry for more, esp. real-life recipes. It was worth its time, nevertheless.

I got this second hand for $3.99 just cause I wanted to reach free shipping at 25 ;)
IMHO, this book just covers the basics, which can be found better online... Go check out springsource forums and their reference guides, which are more detailed, and more importantly, have up to date information.
Other than that, as other reviewer said, pretty much same stuff... not enough enterprise architecture coverage...
Overall, its a good starter. If you are experienced developer/architect/programmer, this is not for you.

I own the previous edition by the same authors (Spring Recipes: A problem Solving Approach). The previous edition is a fantastic book that I would recommend to anyone. When I read the description and purchased this book from the publisher's site (early-release), I expected it to be an updated version with Spring 3.0 coverage. Unfortunately, it is not. In fact, the book has now been split into two parts: Enterprise and Web. This is the enterprise book and the Web book (the one many will be interested in) will not be published until March. Given that this book has traditionally been a single volume and that the split was only revealed when you purchase this book and read the intro, I found the marketing extremely misleading. I wrote the publisher with my concerns that the book's description was misleading. I also wrote Amazon. Neither of them responded. And since it was still officially unreleased I couldn't comment. I've been offered a coupon from the company, but what I'd really like is for some truth in advertising. I know the authors want to sell this book. But I think they should do it by having a solid product and not by luring unsuspecting buyers of the previous edition into thinking this is a continuation of that series. The fact that the series has split into two should be placed somewhere in the description, or anywhere that is obvious to potential buyers. Luckily I've been working with Spring 3 over the past few months by reading the Spring 3 documentation. So when they finally do release their web book I won't need it. And unless I see some rectification of this situation, I don't see myself purchasing another book by these authors.