Reviews for Spring Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

1. Not for newbies. Not a comprehensive reference. Not bad tho..

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2010

   After the rave review by Mr Jeremy Flowers I bought this book. I've used Spring before but am a bit rusty and I really wanted a book which took me through a solid overview of the framework. I'd have to say this is NOT the book to do that. If you are new to Spring I do not recommend you buy this. The reason being that the book is not really designed for newbies. It takes a very unusual problem/solution approach. That's to say the entire book consists of a series of 'problems', categorised within the broad areas Spring covers, plus their solutions. As a means to learn, say Spring IoC or aspects, this format is an incredibly poor teaching mechanism. I later bought Spring in Action by Craig Walls and found it far, far better as a tutorial and reference.
   
   However, let's be fair about this. The book isn't intended to be used as a starting point. I only bought it due to the hysterical review by Mr Flowers. No.. this book is not 'head and shoulders' above other Spring books. For an experienced developer it probably is. They don't want their time wasted with the basics.. they want new information, cunning secret solutions. And this book provides them. In fact it is intended to be a cookbook. Once you know Spring and have used it a bit if you flick through this you'll get a lot from it. If you're a beginner then avoid it and buy Spring in Action or an equivalent.

2. first class, a must own book

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, November 12th, 2009

   Spring is an extremely broad framework. This book was a real eye opener to see the wealth of things which the spring framework can do and how it makes it easier to integrate may other frameworks into your application. The format is a real winner particularly as it lays bare many advanced feature of the core framework that should teach anyone familiar with spring a new trick or two. It then serves as an excellent reference book to be able to pickup, jump to a recipe, and put it into practice in your own code very easily.

3. Bang up to date with 147 golden nuggets of information

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, August 12rd, 2008

   My prediction is this is destined to be a bestseller. Worth it's weight in gold. Gary Mak has created the best book giving a thorough overview of Spring to date. It's up to date with coverage of Spring 2.5. It stands head and shoulders above any of the other Spring books in the marketplace. Spring in Action 2nd edition, comes second in my opinion for an overview, Pro Spring/Java Development with Spring is third equal. These last two are looking dated though.
   For me what distinguished this book from those is you come away armed with the knowledge of how to exploit Spring fully. You don't get a fragmented understanding of the underbelly of Spring and its technologies. You come away with a sense of knowing how to put it all together to utilise Spring commercially.
   The book is comprised of 147 examples spanning nineteen chapters. Each chapters introduced a domain subject area and is expanded upon over the chapter. The format follows the layout of "Problem", "Solution", "How it Works". And each chapter wraps up with a "summary".
   For me it's a winning formula and I wish all computer books followed this format. It's packed full of useful examples that can be lifted and applied to real world applications. The best way to learn. It's up to date in it's use of the latest Java syntax such as generics and varargs.
   The domain examples are quite substantial and the book will make for an excellent reference.
   It's unique selling point include:
   1) Coverage of XFire in the web services chapter 16. Not mentioned in the introduction!
   2) Coverage of Spring Portlet MVC.
   3) Excellent coverage of Spring with JSF.
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   For anyone wanting to learn Spring I'd recommend this book first, and follow it up with David Whitehurt's E-Book Appfuse Primer published by SourceBeat. This will give you a more meaty full blown example showing how to integrate Spring with a myriad of other technologies. Not quite so up to date as this.
   Then follow up with Apress's Spring MVC & Webflow (Ignore the last two chapters on Webflow). Then follow up with Erwin Vervaet's Working with Spring Webflow. (V1 unfortunately. He's got a new book in pipeline by Apress The Definitive Guide to Spring Web Flow that will be V2. Can't wait to see that. But he's another excellent author to learn from. Gives you excellent architectural overview in his first book).