Rarely I write review, however, in this case I will make an exception.

By far this is the best book about Spring you will every read.

VERY easy to read. It is well structured as questions and answers, I am really amazed how detailed it is.

Of course the author(s) did not cover 100% of the Sprint Framework, but by far they have covered it better than anybody else.

For example, AOP, JDBC Templates, Hibernate Templates, JMS Templates, Quartz, Spring WebFlow, Testing, configuring web applications with JPA and Hibernate, Transactions, ...etc have been covered way beyond the basics. So this book along with its code which you can download should get you up and running very quickly.

One thing I wish if it was covered: RUN AS Manager in Spring's Security, and by far that presentation about Security is much more complete than any I have read before.


I give it 5 starts, good job. In the future, I wish the next version will elaborate furthur on Spring Security, and more complex examples on one to many relationships with JBA and Hibernate.

Abu al-Sous

Chicago, IL

I used this book as a quick reference to Spring 2.5 for use on a recent JSF project, and was thrilled at how easy it was to find exactly the information that I was looking for.

With JSF and the application context being my focus, I only read about a third of the book (chapters 1 through 4, 10 and 11).

These chapters detailed exactly what I needed to do to get Spring 2.x up and running with JSF, including how to use it instead of the JSF managed bean creation facility, and how to unlock the request/session scopes.

The chapter on the advanced features of the Spring container is particularly interesting as it clearly portrays the number of ways Spring can instantiate a bean (viz., using a constructor, a static factory method, an instance factory method, from a static field, from an object property, or a factory bean.) Also noteworthy are the Java equivalents that are provided for each of these instantiation methods, making understanding the differences a no-brainer.

There's also a wealth of information on multiple approaches to achieving the same goal (e.g., injecting references using the ref element, using ref attribute of a property element, or using the p schema), with clear indications as to why one might be preferable over the others.

Really stretching for a con here - the recipe approach felt a bit contrived and unnecessary. However, the quality of the writing is beyond reproach, and more than made up for any discomfort I had with the topic structure.

well-written-concise book that covers all spring (even lookup, though other reviewer didn't notice).

Its examples are not stupid, they feel real though simple ones.

I like this book much more than the manning one.

Congratulations to Gary. He has done what lots of authors tried and failed. This is at the moment the best spring 2.x book available. Well-structured, concise and complete. It builds up excellently and takes you from start to finish. What I enjoy the most about this book is that it shows the necessary steps for integrating spring with other high profile open source frameworks and concepts. It is not dry as a reference manual while doesn't try to be funny which is the trick used by some authors as filler.

This is one of the better Spring 2.0 book in the market. I have been using Spring for few years now but this book still managed to surprise me with few recipes. The only caveat I have is that, that lookup-method technique is not covered (unless I missed it, in which case I apologize). All in all a very decent book.