Spring into action with Spring in Action | Spring in Action

Good read | Spring in Action | Craig Walls, Ryan Breidenbach

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	• Spring in Action Craig Walls, Ryan Breidenbach Manning Publications, 2007 - 650 pages average customer review:based on 53 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Good Introduction to Spring

The Java development world continues to grow. Spring (often used in conjunction with Hibernate) is among the newest and is gathering quite a bit of attention. Spring brings almost all of the capabilities of EJB to the world of Plain Old Java Beans.

In this book Walls and Breidenbach have done a superb job of introducing Spring. Often computer books seem to leave out the first forty pages that describe just what it is that they are trying to explain.

In this book Chapter 1 is just about forty pages and is a really excellent introduction. It is titled A Spring Jump Start, but before it jumps off it has sections like Why Spring? This section starts off with a description of the process of writing and testing a bit of code using EJB. It then goes into What is Spring? This section talks about Spring both as a concept and with some very brief code samples. Then there's Understanding Inversion of Control, perhaps the biggest thing that Spring brings with it. And after that is Applying aspect-oriented programming, the secong big Spring thing. After reading this chapter the reader should have a pretty good idea just what Spring can do for him.

If you are still reading after Chapter 1, the remaining chapters give you all the rest of Spring's capabilities using an approach that's kind of tutorial related, kind of reference book oriented.

Compared to most computer books, this one is easy to read (intermediate level, you will certainly need to know Java before you start this book), and has just enough humor mixed in to help keep you awake (after all, it's still a computer book).

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Spring into action with Spring in Action

Information on the web about Spring can be found if you searched enough. The problem is that there was never any kind of clear guide and process by which you could either learn or make good use of the features in Spring.

I spent the better part of 2 hours last weekend at the bookstore reading through some chapters of Spring in Action and Spring PRO. I had already looked at Spring Live and was just too fond of it. Spring PRO turned out to be as dry a reading as the paper it's printed on. Sure it's got a lot of information, but geez, who needs that much, and who can read all of it when it's so hard to stay awake during the reading?

Spring Live offered something the other books didn't:
1- It's easy to read. The Authors, Craig Walls and Ryan Breidenbach, have a pretty good sense of humor, and has obviously put great effort in using good examples which everyone can understand. If you don't know how a student class registration works, you probably didn't go to school. I could have done without the Knight and singing what ever examples, but hey, they didn't hurt anything and got the message through.

2- The book flows in the natural way one would expect to work with Spring. I like the sequence of chapters, as Craig and Ryan layed them out. They start with a quick yet fairly thorough Spring startup, and run from there into wiring, AOP, dao and on down to complete the project. it just works and makes sense, and I don't feel like I'm left wondering about something. They always seem to get to what you need to know as you think about it.

While SiA didn't have the depth of Spring Pro, it still covered everything and then some, with accuracy with what you need to know. It's written from the standpoint, at least in my opinion, that you're a smart engineer, this is not your first time looking at Java or a framework, so they tell you what's going on, and let you figure out things further if you want to and when you need to. You're not plastered with a bazillion pages of details, leaving you skimming page after page for what you want to know. Spring Live just lacks in details, and seems more driven towards those who want to integrate Spring with other frameworks like Struts, and just seems a little too happy on self promoting the author's own tools.

I don't know what these stupid low rated reviews are talking about, it seems they were posted before the book was even published. Sad.

If you want to get going with Spring the right way, get this book and don't waste your money and time on anything else.

Hope this helps.
R

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Good read

I like this book a lot. It covers a lot of material quickly and is easy to read. I compared it to the Pro Spring and this book seemed to cover same ground with fewer pages. Highly recomended.

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An excellent asset to create quality applications

I really enjoyed reading this book. It has a really nice blend of readability, inform-ability and applicability. The book is well structured such that the reader is positioned to understand the Spring Framework from a conceptual level, then delve into the details. I find this is key to any successful technology book. To properly understand Spring the reader must "buy into" inversion of control. The rest of the book uses Spring to support that underlying principle. That doesn't mean the book is theoretical. On the contrary, its for "doers". It reaches into all the nooks and crannies of the Spring framework to show the reader how to apply Spring in real-life. Take a look at the table of contents. Not a stone is left unturned.

Like most things, Spring offers multiple ways of achieving the same thing. The authors explore the alternatives and highlight the pros and cons of each of them. This equips the reader with the rationale to make the appropriate choice for their specific circumstances. That's the hidden gem in this book.

The authors are presenting Spring as a means to write a robust, scalable, flexible, maintainable and secure application. If you want to use Spring to help you achieve those goals, then Spring In Action should be in you library.

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