Spring in Action
Spring in Action
by Craig Walls, Ryan Breidenbach
ISBN 1933988134
Date Read 1/2008My Rating 
One Minute Review
Positives
* Excellent overview of Spring (good coverage)
* Not too detailed; not too light
* Excellent writing style
Negatives
* Feels lengthy
* Too pro-spring
Positives
What'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.
Negatives
I 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).
Summary
Excellent 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.