Author/s: Dave Minter
Publisher: Apress
Review by: Jeanne Boyarsky
Rating: 7 horseshoes
"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 trade-offs. 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.