Customer Reviews

Spring Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I used this book as a quick reference to Spring 2.5 for use on a recent JSF project, and was thrilled at how easy it was to find exactly the information that I was looking for.

With JSF and the application context being my focus, I only read about a third of the book (chapters 1 through 4, 10 and 11).

These chapters detailed exactly what I needed to do to get Spring 2.x up and running with JSF, including how to use it instead of the JSF managed bean creation facility, and how to unlock the request/session scopes.

The chapter on the advanced features of the Spring container is particularly interesting as it clearly portrays the number of ways Spring can instantiate a bean (viz., using a constructor, a static factory method, an instance factory method, from a static field, from an object property, or a factory bean.) Also noteworthy are the Java equivalents that are provided for each of these instantiation methods, making understanding the differences a no-brainer.

There's also a wealth of information on multiple approaches to achieving the same goal (e.g., injecting references using the ref element, using ref attribute of a property element, or using the p schema), with clear indications as to why one might be preferable over the others.

Really stretching for a con here - the recipe approach felt a bit contrived and unnecessary. However, the quality of the writing is beyond reproach, and more than made up for any discomfort I had with the topic structure.

Rarely I write review, however, in this case I will make an exception.

By far this is the best book about Spring you will every read.

VERY easy to read. It is well structured as questions and answers, I am really amazed how detailed it is.

Of course the author(s) did not cover 100% of the Sprint Framework, but by far they have covered it better than anybody else.

For example, AOP, JDBC Templates, Hibernate Templates, JMS Templates, Quartz, Spring WebFlow, Testing, configuring web applications with JPA and Hibernate, Transactions, ...etc have been covered way beyond the basics. So this book along with its code which you can download should get you up and running very quickly.

One thing I wish if it was covered: RUN AS Manager in Spring's Security, and by far that presentation about Security is much more complete than any I have read before.


I give it 5 starts, good job. In the future, I wish the next version will elaborate furthur on Spring Security, and more complex examples on one to many relationships with JBA and Hibernate.

Abu al-Sous

Chicago, IL

I was tasked with having to learn the Spring framework and bought the book "Spring in Action" which.. though it was a very good book.. was sometimes a bit too disconnected at times from the example source code the book would refer to in very short and small snippets. As a result, though I felt I was learning the theoretical academics of Spring, I was hard pressed to feel like I could relate to it on a concrete coding level. As a result, I did my research on other Spring books and found this one. Armed with my cursory theoretical knowledge of Spring, this book was EXACTLY what I needed to connect the theory to actual coding practices and really brought it home in very practical terms. I should point out that a person could very easily learn Spring from just reading this book alone but I think that some up front base knowledge of how Spring works really makes this book shine. My recommendation is to simply read through Spring's tutorials first (online) and then read through this book. When you are done, you will be a Spring expert in no time flat!

I am a Java web developer for a few years. Spring Framework is new to me. I bought this book after reading others reviews. I found the best feature of this book is independent examples in each chapter. Spring has lots frameworks and what I need is web application pieces. The book allows me to pick what needs to read. It begins with a new example in a chapter. One main good thing about this book is that its Tip always reminders me of where to find required jars/soruce files from downloaded spring packages without mistakes, so that I would not get lost while following the examples.
If you have some experience in web Java and want to learn Spring Framework, it is a good book I would recommand.

Kathy

I have used "Spring in Action" (SIA) to get the basic idea of Spring. Then I read "Spring Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach" as suggested by our Spring UG president [...]. I found this is much better for a newbie. I feel that it has more code/description ratio (30%/70%) as opposed to SIA (20%/80%), which normally would not be a good thing, but the author has a "Problem"/"Solution"/"How it works" approach which is clears up things pretty good.
I have not read all the chapters yet (8 out of 19), but most of it is good. I did not like chapter 7 ("Spring support for JDBC") -- but I have not finished the chapter yet.
Only thing missing, for me ,is a exercise section for each chapter.

Congratulations to Gary. He has done what lots of authors tried and failed. This is at the moment the best spring 2.x book available. Well-structured, concise and complete. It builds up excellently and takes you from start to finish. What I enjoy the most about this book is that it shows the necessary steps for integrating spring with other high profile open source frameworks and concepts. It is not dry as a reference manual while doesn't try to be funny which is the trick used by some authors as filler.

This is THE book you should own if you are using Spring. It is organized as cookbook. I refer to it all the time. Very thorough and complete. Of course if you want a good introduction you should read Craig Walls book on Spring If you want to use Spring Web Services or Spring Security in a more than elementary way read the respective reference manuals.

This book is a great companion to "Spring in Action". It was obviously written by someone who earned a living as Java developer and knew what other developers need when learning a new framework for their jobs. I liked the way the book is organized into three main sections, Core, Fundamentals and Advanced. Each section had self-evident no nonsense titles like "Inversion of Control and Containers" or "Spring Security".

I wish I had this book three years ago when I was learning to use the Spring framework. Instead, I had the ever self-indulgent "Spring: A Developer's Notebook", which was a complete waste of $30.

I almost never write reviews for books, but I felt compelled to do so after reading this book.

I have read the Spring In Action book, and it was decent. It is, in my opinion, incomplete and full of silly analogies. However this book is quite different.

It is marvelous, whether you're using it for a reference, learning from scratch, or if you have some knowledge of Spring but want to learn more. It is extremely well written. The code examples I've seen have all been correct. They are simple enough to understand at first glance, but are complex enough to show you multiple ways to solve a problem.

The text for each chapter starts simple, but if you keep reading it begins to solve the problems you would have encountered if you had started to code right then; the text flows very well.

This book is very concise and gets straight to the point, but doesn't leave out any important details. It isn't full of analogies or explanations that are generally meant for people who don't know programming. You should probably be familiar with the basics of Java for most of the book, and Java Servlets if you're reading the Spring MVC section.

This book is not only for developers who at least know the basics of Java, but is great even for seasoned developers who want to learn about everything Spring has to offer. It covers pretty much everything there is to know.

This is truly a book I'm glad and proud to have on my bookshelf.

Just a short note to say that I was absolutely delighted by how well this book is written. The author seems to truly want to teach, as opposed to wanting to make money. And teach he does, in a very well disciplined approach of describing the fundamentals before proceeding to describe the details. I gained most of my Spring knowledge from this excellent book and heartily recommend it for anyone who wants get up and running with Spring MVC.