The move from so-called heavyweight architectures, such as Enterprise JavaBeans, toward lightweight frameworks, like Spring, has not stopped since Pro Spring was published by Rob Harrop and Jan Machacek in 2005; in fact, it's picked up pace. The Spring Framework remains the leader in this move and provides a platform on which you can build your own applications and services.

Pro Spring 2.5 covers the new features of Spring 2.5, but moreover, it is focused on the best practices and core standards of contemporary Spring development. As members of the Spring development team at Cake Solutions, the author team brings extensive practical experience gained from working with Spring since version 1.0 and delivering successful systems on top of it.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 9 Ratings

Waste of money, poorly written - 2009-02-09
Reviewer Rating:
I ignored the reviews and decided to purchase this book anyways. What a mistake. The book is poorly written with incomplete examples riddled with errors. I tried downloading the code samples from the web site to follow along and very few worked. Stick to the "..In Action" series. These are written much better, and more reasonably priced. Lessons learned!

Was good for its time - 2009-01-28
Reviewer Rating:
Back when I was first starting out with Spring I wanted to know more than just "How can I make it do this thing that I need right now".

The industry is abuzz with people who are passionate about "dependency injection", "AOP", and "Spring and Hibernate". Rather than just jumping on the bandwagon and picking up the bare necessities required to make my current project work with these trendy technologies, I picked up the most up-to-date references available and read them from end to end.

I think that the authors have done a reasonable job of covering quite a vast subject.

Where I feel this book differs from some others is the depth to which the configuration options are explained, and the care that the authors take in explaining why you might choose one approach over another (e.g. XmL configuration versus annotation based configuration).

Can anyone honestly say that there was a better reference available at the time this work came out?

--
Stephen Souness

Excellent Book - 2009-07-18
Reviewer Rating:
I don't understand why this book has gotten such poor reviews. I was apprehensive about buying it but I really needed a comprehensive Spring book. I am very happy with this book. Everything is described very thoroughly and clearly and the code examples are short and to the point. While the text appears very dense, I am breezing through the chapters due to the quality of the writing.

The number of pages and chapters may be daunting but the book is well organized, which allows you to pick out the chapters or sections relevant to your specific need.

Quite useful - 2009-06-23
Reviewer Rating:
"Pro Spring 2.5" is the first and the most comprehensive guide to Spring Framework 2.0 and 2.5. released till now. The book can be thought of as a continuation of "Pro Spring" but it is not as good as its predecessor. "Pro Spring 2.5" is still valuable if you plan to learn about Spring Framework as a whole. It has more than 900 pages and touches many topics related to Spring Framework and other technologies, like Spring WebFlow, DWR, AJAX and many more.

Beside presenting Spring basics, the book nicely covers many new features introduced in Spring 2.0 or Spring 2.5 like: dynamic language support, XML Schema-based configuration, Spring TestContext Framework, load-time weaving ,etc.
On the other side, "Pro Spring 2.5" has a dedicated chapters on JAVA EE 5 but it does not cover JMS or EJB at all!

The book is quite easy to read and understand. It provides a good, overall knowledge of nearly all areas of Spring Framework related topics. The weakest point of the book is sample source, since it has many typos and even compilation problems.

Incomplete, but an excellent introduction - 2009-01-29
Reviewer Rating:
After trying to wrap my head around the online Spring docs, I was about to give up on the whole thing. Then I bought this book, started at chapter one, and just kept reading until it made sense. There are many typos in the code listings that can bite you if you aren't paying attention, and there is definitely stuff I read in the online Spring docs that wasn't in the book (and I think if I hadn't read the online docs first I might have been more frustrated with this book) but overall I am glad I bought it, and I do recommend it.

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