Beginning Spring 2: From Novice to Professional (Beginning Spring 2: from Novice to Professional)

Spring has made a remarkable rise since its conception in 2002. Users find Spring the ideal framework to build their applications in J2EE environments. Beginning Spring 2 is the first and only Spring?authorized book that takes you through the first steps of using Spring, and requires no prior J2EE experience. It discusses relevant integrated technologies that you should be aware of, and illustrates how Spring makes using them easier.

The book teaches the correct usage of Spring in applications, and lowers the learning curve on J2EE standards. It covers useful features of Spring without delving too far into complicated features. The authors take advantage of less complex alternatives whenever possible, and shows how Spring can make you more productive in complicated environments where J2EE technologies need to be applied. The book covers the complete Spring web tools portfolio and deals with persistence and transaction management. It also introduces 3?tier application design and how to test these designs.

User review
first 9 chapters good, chapter 10 disappointing
`Beginning Spring 2 - From Novice to Professional` is a clear introduction to Spring. The book was designed to be readable whether you are new to Spring or have been using Spring 1.X. Chapter one covers the main concepts such as inversion of controller and aspect oriented programming. The description of why they are useful read very nicely.

There was (mostly) a good balance of code to description along with good discussion on tradeoffs. I like how the author included tangential concepts and libraries. I learned about Hessian and Burlap - two reporting tools I hadn't heard of. I was a little surprised there were only two paragraphs on JMS - seems like it would be more popular.

There were a couple of typos, but nothing major. I was a bit disappointed by the testing chapter - one sentence contained four negatives which was awkward to read. A test method was over a page long. Examples are JUnit 3.8 (4.0 was out and well used in 2007.) In fact most of my concerns were in this last chapter. The Swing chapters were better.

I did learn about Spring and that was the goal of the book. I do recommend it.

User review
Might not be the best choice for the true beginner
The title of this book Beginning Spring 2: From Novice to Professional may be a bit misleading. I think if you are new to Spring and especially if you are new to Java frameworks in general, you would have a hard time with this book. This is not a how do you build a Spring application type book as I was expecting. After reading several chapters I still didn't really know how to get started, and I have years of experience with Java and the Struts framework. The author does a fair job of explaining the benefits of Struts in a theoretical way, but the concrete examples seem disconnected and difficult to apply. There is no `Hello World` type example that explains how to get a simple Spring application up an running.

The book does contain some good examples once you are familiar with Spring, so this book may be more beneficial for experienced Spring developers. If you are a true beginner, this may not be the book for you.

User review
Terrible Book
This is the worst book I have ever spent money on. I completely agree with the first two reviews. Don't waste your time or money on this book. Get Spring in Action, or a different one.

User review
Not so `Beginning`
I agree with the first commenter. The author shows small snippets of code here and there right after his explanation. But those code are just,,. snippets.

Do not expect a tutorial-style build a simple project from scratch type of book. The best thing you can do is to download the code example and pray if you can run it.

I understand that Spring isn't a framework specifically for web-app (thus no Hello World example), but let's face it, how many projects are using Spring and not web-app related?



User review
Not appropriate for Beginners
How can this be the first & only Spring authorized book?

When I brought this book I was totally new to Spring but I needed to learn it since our project was mandated to use it. Even after reading the first three chapters (which the author states is required reading), I still couldn't quite get it. First, the author spends too much time in chapters 1 and 2 singing the praises of Spring and doesn't even present a standard `Hello World` solution. Finally in chapter 3 he does start getting into code but its rather convoluted and is only meant to show how/why the Spring Framework saves time versus doing things the usual way.

I finally gave up and went and purchased the `Spring in Action` book by Craig Walls which is excellent for the beginner and even presents a relevent & simple code example from the get-go in Chapter 1. The Walls book is what the beginner needs ad explains every concept from both a historical and relevant use point-of-view.

Now that I've been using Spring for a while, I can say that Minter's book is appropriate only if you already know the fundamentals and want to use it for quick reference (which I do) in its later chapters. But don't buy it expecting any `hand-holding` on your journey to master the Spring Framework.