Review - Spring Recipes

First of all i liked the book very much. I liked the description on overall Spring Framework architecture as well of the details of particular components.

Its a good beginning and great tutorial. While reading the book i realized how much better is spring now comparing to what it was a few years ago. Its a really great platform.

The book covers all most important parts of the system. I think its worth reading it together with oryginal Spring manuals. Spring 3 has great documentation and reading it together with the book will let you not only learn the old school way but also cast some light on what is comming and how to use spring according to the latest best practices.

As a PHP developer with javascript experience im used to a certain way of doing things. It was a really good experience to play around with Spring MVC 3 for a few months as the new features are really cool. All the pieces that might be missing (from spring 3) are well covered in the Spring manuals.

The chapters i liked the most were probably inversion of control container, aspect oriented programming and database access helpers. Its a really great set of tools and book shows you many possible applications. You will learn how to integrate Java with Spring MVC on top of it with your applications via Restful web interfaces. Spring 3 introduces even further improvements.

Another good thing about the book is that its written in easy to understand english. Structure is very good and all examples are logical and suitable. No foo/bar nonsense :)

To summarize i really liked that book and i would recommend it to all beginner Spring users. Also people who havent used Spring 2.5 yet could benefit from the book as it shows you how Spring can be applied in context of MVC as well as traditional applications. It aslo explains well some of the programming techniques and best practices.

J2EE seems like a dinosaur in comparison to Spring and its new development practices :) With Spring there is a light in the tunell.

Final score 9/10