Pro Spring

Rating:
Summary: Best way to learn Spring
Review: After reading way too many docs about way too many web view technologies, I found Spring which was exactly what I was looking for to help me with the middle and back-end tiers. The only problem is that even though everyone says it's so well documented, the documents tend to be either in-depth reference manuals or really simple tutorials that only show one aspect of the framework.

I was very pleased to find this book, and after reading it, I feel very excited about starting a large spring adventure.

This book covers just about everything you need to know about Spring to build a full blown app, but more importantly it also shows you where/how to start (which is not so easy to figure out sometimes) and how to implement things in a very reusable way.

The organization of the book seems strange sometimes... having the huge sometimes confusing section about AOP in the beginning (chapters 6 & 7) really makes your brain spin, but by the time you get to chapter 11 (designing and implementing Spring applications) you can easily put things together and the previous sections make more sense.

The book takes you through building a blog application as it's main sample app, but all along the way there are many many tiny little code examples that are self-contained and demonstrate how a single concept works. This *does* work well to make sense of things, but I wish there was a section that only delt with building the sample app from start to finish all in one place.

Also, after downloading the sample app, I had a few problems running it.... there aren't any configuration instructions, even though you can choose any of 3 data layers, and once I built and deployed it, I found it was missing some jar dependencies. Once I put them in place, it did run as expected.

I think that the best thing about this book is probably the way in which it promotes good software design and reuse, even if you're not going to use Spring through the use of the DOM pattern, designing to interfaces, and testing.

All in all, this is a great book. If you're looking to build an application using Spring, read this book. It's the best resource for getting started, and will also make a great reference.