My impression is that the author had worked on a day job where he participated in converting an old fashioned, outmoded JSP Web App into a JSP Web App that uses Spring to implement EE patterns in vogue back in about the year 2003.
The problem is that EE patterns are a poor fit for Spring. Spring was designed as an alternative to EE that replaces clunky EE solutions with simple, lightweight solutions implemented in a simple J2EE container like Tomcat.
Spring was initially developed as a reaction against the clunkiness and heavy handedness of EE. In this book however, the author demonstrates how to use Spring to implement those features of EE that Spring was designed to replace, not enable.
I did not see any examples in the book of using Spring annotations. Nor did I see any mention of the new Spring taglibs used in Spring 2.x and higher to simplify configuration of transactions, etc.
This book did not add to my knowledge so much as it copy/pasted code examples from the web application he was assigned to on his day job. It was not a fun book to read. It felt at times like reading a very dull, old phone book.
By comparison the book about Groovy by Venkat Subramanium is a real page turner. Groovy, Grails, and Griffon are where the future of web development is going. (The company that develops Spring, SpringSource, has purchased G2One, the company that makes Groovy/Grails, and is folding Groovy, Grails, etc., into Spring).

At the very outset, I would like to mention that Pro Java EE Spring Patterns book is meant for people who are well versed with J2EE/JEE and the Spring framework. If you are looking to learn Spring, there are other books that might be more suitable.

The idea of this book is to illustrate the major JEE design patterns and how you can use Spring to implement those.

The author, Dhrubojyoti Kayal, has a distinctive style of writing that is easy to understand and follow. There are code snippets galore in the book and configuration details. These two facets make the book a very valuable asset for any serious JEE Architect who is looking to make the most out of the Spring framework. Towards the end, there is a chapter that demonstrates how to ease development of Spring based projects using Maven and the pretty nice Blazon ezJEE IDE. The IDE, based on Eclipse, has the necessary plug-ins already configured thus making life easier for the developers.

Overall, this is a very good book that talks about the core JEE design patterns and the Spring implementation of it.

What do you gain from this book?

* A unique insight into how Spring can be used to implement Core JEE patterns
* A recap of the JEE patterns
* Using the power of Maven to make development less tedious

I highly recommend this book to JEE Architects and designers.

Great job done!!!