Spring in Action
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 The biggest issue at the time of the writing of this review is that the book is outdated: The examples may still work, but e.g. Spring MVC has some substantial simplifications in Spring 2.5, and Spring 3.0 is not far off, either, so I'd wait for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 2nd edition of this book.
Nice 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.
This book is good, but it could be better.
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.
An excellent book with a lot going for it!
Overall, Spring in Action (SIA) is an excellent book, well worth buying. Here are my impressions after having studied (in a group) several portions of the book a little while ago:
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Pros are:
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- SIA contains many memorable source code examples that help the concepts stick in one's mind.
- Very much in the tradition of books from Manning publishers, the print quality is pleasing, and the book lays flat nicely for easy reading. In this aspect, it's right up there with the book "Code Craft: The Practice of Writing Excellent Code" by Pete Goodliffe (Publisher: No Starch Press), which, by the way, is another eminently readable, useful book. This is in stark contrast with the book "Eclipse Distilled" by David Carlson (Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional). While the content quality of "Eclipse Distilled" is very good, the print quality is poor (I'm all for printing on recycled paper, but not on shoddy recycled paper) and the binding inferior -- Try keeping the book "Eclipse Distilled" lying open on a flat surface, and it'll spring [sic - no pun intended in connection with the book I'm reviewing] shut like a steel trap; so much easy reading :-( But SIA is not like that at all and, in sum, excels in this respect.
- The basics are covered very well -- Dependency Injection and AOP, solving persistence problems, handling asynchronous messaging -- It's all in here!
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Cons are:
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- In more places than I care to count, SIA tends to have a rambling style.
- Hand-in-hand with the rambling style -- while an excellent tutorial that's worth studying and owning -- SIA is not eminently suitable as a reference. But for that we can always go to the ubiquitous online Spring API.
Find examples elsewhere.
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.
