Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework [Paperback]

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".

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