Reviews for Spring: A Developer's Notebook

1. Very poor

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, July 12st, 2009

   O'Reilly's 'Development Notebook' series is a bit of a mixed bag - I used the 'Hibernate Developer's Notebook' to get up to speed with Hibernate and, despite being a bit dated, it managed to get the salient points across with the minimum of fuss.
   
   The Spring Developer's Notebook, however, is the polar opposite - there were various horror stories about the first edition of the book, but I was fortunate(?) enough to get the 'updated' edition and, guess what, it's still pretty bad.
   
   Whilst there may be gems of information hidden in there, finding them is a chore as the book contains a load of information which isn't really relevant - for example the section on configuring Ant - and a whole load of whimsical rambling about kayaking and mountain biking which is more suited to a third-rate blog than a supposedly technical book.
   
   Worst of all, despite O'Reilly's assurances that they'd actually done some testing this time the code examples don't work. Given that the online documentation for Spring varies in quality from 'merely OK' to 'downright terrible' this is really unforgivable. Eventually I gave up and dived into the online docs in an attempt to find enlightenment.
   
   On the plus side, the book does give a fairly pain-free overview of things like the MVC model, inversion of control and writing test cases but in no way does that make up for the poor quality of the rest of the book. As such, even its quality as a quick reference is questionable.
   
   It's been a long time since O'Reilly dropped the ball as badly as this (anyone remember the dreadful book on Linux Clustering?) and they'd be better off going for a third edition with updates for Spring 2.5 and completely different authors. A pity, since Bruce Tate has written some good books. This, however, isn't one of them.
   
   Avoid.

2. Still marred by incomplete coding examples

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, September 12th, 2008

   After buying this book I ran into horror stories on the web about how the coding examples were completely broken. The good news is that most of the errata do now (2008) seem to have been applied. The bad news is that there are still gaps and inconsistencies. If you buy this book make sure to check all the errata sheets at the book's web-site before trying to get anything to work. Also download the source code, but be aware that it will require some work to get going, especially the build.xml files, which still have numerous dependencies to the authors' personal directory layout.
   
   Also note that the book is peppered with irrelevant references to Bruce Tate's favoured pastimes of kayaking and mountain-biking. These add nothing whatever to the book and it would be better without them.

3. Not perfect but damn useful

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, May 12rd, 2008

   Personally I found this book has a very useful role. Due to its scope and flexibility Spring can sometimes be pretty intimidating. I have been repeatedly reading through 'Spring in Action' and 'Professional Java Development with Spring'. They are both great books but contain so many abstract concepts that it can be hard to take in.
   
   This book is useful because it takes a concrete (and realistic) example, and explains why you need to be using the various parts of the Spring framework. After reading the other books several times each and still feeling confused, I found that this book had me understanding everything within minutes. It is useful for getting you up and running quickly but certainly doesn't cover everything - you still need the other books.

4. A book full of CRAP

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, March 12th, 2008

   This is complete waste of time. Instead of acting as a quick intro to Spring technology, this book wastes a lot of time trying to figure out how to run examples and even the code in the book and downloaded from website doesn't work.
   
   Can I get my money and time I spent back? Also there should be an option for -ve stars.

5. Good intentions, poor execution

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, June 12st, 2005

   I had used the Hibernate - Dev Notebook some weeks ago and found it a thoroughly excellent book. Held your hand tightly as you learnt the concepts and almost 100% accurate in terms of instructions / code samples. However, the same cannot be said for this one.

   There are fairly substantial gaps in the book which are simply glossed over and leaves you confused and wondering what to do next.
   There are pieces of configuration which are simply left out from the configuration and when you run the code, nothing works. After much digging in other Spring Ref manuals, managed to figure it out.

   Having said all that, increased my Spring knowledge and teaches you not only the concept but how to apply it in code. So, achieves it's goal albeit painfully!