Hibernate in Action (In Action series)

Spring in Action (In Action series)

Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework

Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB

Head First Design Patterns

Programming

Pro Spring

Format: Paperback
Author: Rob Harrop
ReleaseDate: 20 January, 2005
Publisher: Apress
Rating:

great for beginners
It's very well organized with lots of code examples and a great example project. I had never used Spring before reading this book, and this book gave me the knowledge I needed to start. If you want to know Spring, you need this book.

Comprehensive Coverage with tons of Real world examples
Based on a few recommendations I'd read around the blogsphere I ordered a copy of Pro Spring and I've gotta say I've been hugely impressed. For a new web project I've been learning the Spring Framework.

I've been reading/implementing for around two weeks. When it arrived I was sure it was a lemon (how could it cover MVC in a measly 45 pages?). What I didn't count on was how *good* the examples are. Sure, you don't get the total coverage of a dedicated MVC book, but you get *excellent* coverage of more areas of the framework than you could possibly imagine.

The database-driven web app I'm building is using Velocity, iBatis, Postgres and Spring, and, even though I've used iBatis before, I've learned heaps of tricks while reading the Spring/iBatis integration chapter (like using inheritance in resultmaps). I've got parent/child selects and inserts going on, I've got my auditing going to the database (using a Spring HandlerInterceptor to check page access), I've got connection pooling and all sorts of cool stuff. And I've been having a ball all the way through.

Even the mail integration chapter is awesome! Gives great examples of generating rich html emails using Velocity with embedded images (exactly the thing I've always wanted to do with mail!).

The appendix on unit testing is also full of gems! What a great idea to have a transactional unit test that you can roll back when your test is done without touching your test db!

What has really surprised me about this book is the rich quality of the examples. There have really picked stuff that you want to do in the real world. In fact, the more I get into this book, the more battle tested it feels. It definitely has the feel of "we've built a dozen production apps in this framework, and here's the dirt on what we've learned along the way". I *love* that in a book!

I've had a scan through Spring in Action and at first glance it doesn't seem to have either the breadth or depth of Pro Spring. Matt Raible's Spring Live looks very cool, though (particularly since he has stuff in there about Spring WebFlow). Be good if SourceBeat provided a detailed table of contents, though, where you could see the details of what's covered before buying a copy (rather than just see the title of each chapter).

Anyways, Pro Spring gets a huge tick from me! Great job, Rob & Jan! And great stuff apress! Highly recommended!.

The best book for learning Spring


Every chapter is written very well and the book has extensive coverage of all of Spring's features as well as beefy examples that really help one to grasp the concepts. I recommend this book and also "Java Development with the Spring Framework" by Wrox (Wiley). The JDBC chapter is a bit weaker than the rest of the chapters, but all in all it's a great book and I highly recommend it.