I am a great fan of struts framework and have been looking out for Spring Framework from quite some time. Did lot of search on internet but was not able to find much information.

This book gave me exactly what I needed and it helped me in understanding n appreciating the concepts and simplicity of Spring Framework.

I enjoyed the first edition and this one is equally good. I would like more information about MVC (or a Spring MVC in action book) but anyway it's highly recommendable. I hope they update it soon to Spring 2.5.

This book is exactly what you would expect from the In Action Series. The book is thorough and comprehensive. I even thought it had a slightly more personal writing style than some other In Action books.

I bought this book as an experienced programmer with 10 years of professional experience with Java, .NET, PHP, etc. Having no idea of what Spring was or how to use it, I read many reviews talking up this book.

Its a good book in that it explains how to do configure options in the framework and gives some understandable examples. But at no point do you actually get walked through setting up a spring project say in NetBeans or Eclipse.

Thats the perspective throughout the book. You move from chapter to chapter being presented with a new angle of the framework and a high-level example of how its done but no "Sit down and build this in your IDE, then hook it up using the spring feature to actually SEE it work".

Good book, but I know that I will need some additional info to be able to start using the framework.

I purchased this book to learn Spring. I was looking for a book that would plainly explain the reason for Spring, its benefit as a framework and provide clear examples of how to implement Spring in my projects.

The authors do a satisfactory job explaining the need for Spring, it's history and its impact on alleviating code-dependencies. The examples are simple and easy to understand, overall. The authors fail, however, to clearly demonstrate how Spring is implemented. The examples are verbose with partial file listings. For example, I would like to know more about the framework context. The authors show snippets of XML code but do not show entire files or adequately explain how the files are related to the framework. The source code example is incomplete. Its missing dependencies and there is no explanation what they may be. I spent 30 mins searching then gave up.

"Spring in Action" discusses implementing Spring with Struts, iBatis, Hibernate and some other frameworks in a failrly detailed manner.

Overall I would say the book is OK but not concise.

I have a handful of Spring books and all but this one are more for reference than concepts. Between Spring online docs and Google, I don't use my Spring reference books. Spring In Action is the best book for learning about Spring. Topics like AOP, MVC and dependency injection are not ones you're likely to just read about and think "I've got it!". These are big concepts and require examples that encompass the concepts and break them down a piece at a time. I found the author's style engaging as well clear, indeed, many of the concepts put forward in this book have stayed with me for years.

This book contains too many unnecessay talks, and few/complete code examples. It's painful to read 8 pages without seeing one line of codes.

Craig Walls and Ryan Breidenbach certainly conveyed the concept of Spring Dependency Injection like the master teacher and successfully delivered their Spring preachings in parables (Juke the 15 bags juggler and Shakespearean poet in a winning tandem performance). Superb piece of Spring publication.

Although this book is lengthy (over 700 pages), it is also the most thorough and readable Spring Framework 2.0 (Spring) text in the late-2007 marketplace. The relatively brief coverage of the presentation layer that includes subjects such as Spring MVC and Spring Web Flow is also decent (Spring can exist apart from these other frameworks). Even though Spring Framework 2.5 was recently released, I do not expect this book to be superceded any time soon. The author covers a lot of ground, but he usually explains the material with sufficient depth for the reader to gain the confidence necessary to explore further the presented technologies. Note that this book does not assume any knowledge of Spring, beginning immediately with an easy-to-understand discussion on dependency injection and aspect-oriented programming (AOP), two of the cornerstones of Spring. Of course, if you are familiar with these subjects, you can skip to a later chapter with the foreknowledge that the majority of the text covers Spring, including advanced aspects of the technology. The diagrams and short examples are always relevant, and even as a stickler for adherence to industry standards I appreciate the liberty Walls has taken with his UML notation. Overall, this latest edition of "Spring in Action" is a great buy, and as a Technical Architect I will be recommending it to my team along with the online Spring documentation.

Although this book is lengthy (over 700 pages), it is also the most thorough and readable Spring Framework 2.0 (Spring) text in the late-2007 marketplace. The relatively brief coverage of the presentation layer that includes subjects such as Spring MVC and Spring Web Flow is also excellent (although closely related to Spring, these other frameworks can technically exist apart from Spring). Even though Spring Framework 2.5 was recently released, I do not expect this book to be superceded any time soon. The author covers a lot of ground, but he always explains the material with sufficient depth for the reader to gain the confidence necessary to explore further the presented technologies. Note that this book does not assume any knowledge of Spring, beginning immediately with an easy-to-understand discussion on dependency injection and aspect-oriented programming (AOP), two of the cornerstones of Spring. Of course, if you are familiar with these subjects, you can skip to a later chapter with the foreknowledge that the majority of the text covers Spring, including advanced aspects of the technology. The diagrams and short examples are always relevant, and even as a stickler for adherence to industry standards I appreciate the liberty Walls has taken with his UML notation. Overall, this latest edition of "Spring in Action" is a great buy, and as a Technical Architect I will be highly recommending it to my team.

They captured it. They've got all the examples, with all the right level of complexity. They're good.

I've been using this book at work for a month or so, to introduce people to the Spring framework, and it really works.

In particular, it seems there's a lot more interest in JMX, and monitoring applications, and this book does a great overview.

If you want to learn spring, it is a good book to start. Even though most of the materials could be found on the web, it is easier to learn it from the book. It organizes the materials well so you get to know the basic first and can quickly create a working application.

As far as an introduction of Spring 2.0, it's good. But it'll be A+ if there are more practical applications and probe in depth.

Must read for Spring Developers.I admire the book and as the title suggests its in ACTION. So there is no room for non-sense stuff.

We can right away use the tips and techniques mentioned in the book ;-)

This tome hits your desk with a great thud factor (over 700 pages), but much of that is due to their use on two inch side and bottom margins and nearly 3 inches on the top. This book never finds itself in the neighborhood of usefulness and it even manages to contradict the on-line documentation for Spring (and that is really saying something considering how poor the on-line docs for Spring have become, and Spring 1.0 docs were quite good. what happened??). After the disaster known as "Hibernate Quickly," I've come to expect very little from Manning and I continue to be underwhelmed.

The reader is delusional if they think any part of this book contains working code or clear, concise help in understanding Spring. There are a few good points in all the garbage. Chapter one opens well with an overview of Spring (though it starts an amazing 34 printed pages in), but starts to fall short about section 1.4. Walls also uses the correct objective case of whom (the misuse of which is a grammatical pet-peeve of mine), but the book quickly becomes forgettable. Walls may be a Spring framework apologist, but an author he is not. Perhaps he should stick with feeding his fish and playing with his kids.

Great introduction/reference book. Although I've read only the first 4 chapters (Spring Core), I can see how this book will help me to start writing web applications using Spring right away.

Spring in action 2.0 was released on the 16th of August 2007. These comments hitherto are not for version 2.0. The "in action" series of manning are however excellent. Looking at the comments and ratings of the previous version(s) of this book it is worthwhile going for this edition especially if the authors of this edition are the same ones who wrote the previous edition(s).
I have not yet got this book but I intend getting this book myself as soon as I can steal some time from the project on which Im working.

We use Spring extensively in our company and I think this is a must have book for everyone working/learning spring

Delivered the item as mentioned in the item description. Very happy.

This is a well written book. I enjoyed the gentle introduction to spring. I was surprised with the several problems I had with the downloaded code. The code does not work and is not orgainized by chapters. I hope the second edition comes with working code.

This book did exactly what I wanted it to do: gave me a good understanding of the nuts and bolts of development using the Spring Framework. It gave me an appreciation for the capabilities of the framework, and enough knowledge that I can comfortably create a Spring-based application.

As many other reviewers have mentioned, this book is riddled with errors. I am comfortable enough with my Java knowledge that I was able to read over a mistake and think "hey, that's not right." If I were less experienced, I imagine the errors would really make things confusing, and I would probably be less forgiving.

If you consider yourself to have a solid understanding of Java, and are willing to accept the imperfections of the proofreaders and editors, then go ahead and read this book; it will still give you a good understanding of the Spring Framework.

Although Spring has moved forward with other add-ons, this book is a must read to "get your feet wet" with the core concepts / components of the Spring Framework. In fact, most, in not all of the Spring functionality you will use will be found in this book.

I should have believed the negative reviews. Did they even try their source? They couldn't have.

The explanations are fair, but the poor quality of the source examples makes you wonder.

This book is poorly edited and horribly designed. The author couldn't even write a good/complete example. Go to there website now and see that their example isn't even fully implemented. They even had to rewrite the example because they "learned" some stuff about Spring since writting the book. I thought you had to know something about Spring to write a whole book and then you can't even write a short example? Not a good place to start to learn about Spring. To give credit where its due, the first three chapters weren't bad, but they had nothing to do about Spring.