I recently opened this book, not from the beginning but from the MVC chapters, and it's pretty amazing, I already had experience with Spring but lacked the MVC features, and I must say reading this book is pretty straight forward, not boring at all, and besides being a good reference of the MVC components it gives a good insight on how Spring works internally which is a good thing. And add to it the portlet MVC and other free online content, it's a good deal. I can't wait to read it all over.
Wow - a breath of fresh air
Talk about Injection. This book details how to use it to inject services in your requests. The only way to appreciate spring is if you have implemented or been maintaining code the old way and then see Spring in Action. Its great for injecting anything you can think of in the Application Stack. The only thing I did not appreciate or dont see the need is the Spring MVC but thats my take. I think RIA has Spring eating dust there.
Enjoy.
Fantastic, Made more sense the 2nd time
Fantastic book! Some of it didn't make sense the first time through, probably because AOP can get pretty complicated.
Mr. Walls does a great job of giving you an intuition about Spring 2 and of teaching how to solve real enterprise problems with it. Can't wait until Spring 3 comes out and the book is updated!!
Quite an update from the 1st edition
I've been using Spring for almost 5 years and love the productivity boost it provides by letting me focus on business logic and letting Spring tie all the little pieces together in a standard fashion. I already had the 1st edition of this book and although you can find a lot of this information in the Spring documentation that quite often also requires digging into the Spring source to be able to utilize the framework to the fullest extent, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. However sometimes I'm in a hurry and if I can get the information I'm looking for from one source sitting on my desk then I'm all for it. This book is a good reference and I use it along with the Spring documentation.
The reason I bought this now is that I was looking for another source of information on Spring integration with caching frameworks and there are several pages in this book covering this subject, which was not in the 1st edition.
If you have only one Spring reference in your library I highly recommend this one. I've gotten a couple of others over the years and they are a cure for insomnia. Not so this one.
Best book for beginners and experts
This is the best book on Spring I have read. I have gone through other books but this one is simply the best.
The writing style is very good. Author gives relevant and easy to remember analogies and examples to explain a topic.
I especially like the Spring MVC chapter, where author beautifully explains the basic concepts using the example of Rantz application.
I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn Spring. Even for experienced programmers this book is really good for reference and for learning new concepts.
Cons: Doesn't cover Spring 2.5+, but that is not a big drawback I think
