The Pragmatic Craftsman :: Simplicity from complexity ::

Spring in Action
by Craig Walls, Ryan Breidenbach
ISBN 1933988134
Date Read 1/2008

My Rating

One Minute ReviewPositives* Excellent overview of Spring (good coverage)* Not too detailed; not too light* Excellent writing style

Negatives* Feels lengthy* Too pro-spring

PositivesWhat’s not to like? I think this is an excellent resource for the Spring Framework. I liked it as a refresher for some of the Spring 2.0 features, but I’m also going to use it as a reference.

This book is easy to read. It has a clear writing style. The author focuses on the important parts, and the subject changes quickly, as Spring’s coverage area is huge.

One of the chapters I really liked (based on my previous experiences), is the web services chapter. Nice and simple. Easy to get it working locally. The Spring/Xfire combination is the best and easiest web services configuration I’ve seen: inject web services beans into the class and your class is not even aware it’s using web services! Very powerful abstraction.

NegativesI read the first edition of the book and I remember it as a quick read. No longer. This edition is over 700 pages! (On the other hand, this is a much better edition in terms of content.)

No mention of Java Config! As far as I know, you can now configure Spring in Java, no XML. It might be Spring 2.5 (I thought it was 2.0).

I think the author could be a little more bold. Yes, Spring is great, but it has some negatives. I did not learn about them in this book. The author has a very “neutral” position. I guess this is my personal desire to see a book that would tell me how to use Spring effectively, some anti-patterns, ie. Effective Spring (if you read Effective Java, you know what I mean).

SummaryExcellent overview of Spring. Good coverage on almost all Spring features. Could be more detailed at times, but overall it does an excellent job introducing the different parts of Spring. I recommend this book to anyone who is using/considering Spring.