Customer comments on this selection.
 Must be one of the best Spring books out there
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.
 Exactly What You Would Expect
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.
Good from a theory point of view
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.
 Good Attempt - Needs work
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.
The most helpful Spring book
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.
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