Hello Paul,
As the name sais, the book is designed to help you study for the certification exam. But since Spring changes so fast this days (as the whole software industry for that matter) it is a good idea to keep an eye on the official Spring blog.
Nonetheless, the books covers in details design
patterns and Spring internals to help you really understand how Spring works. After you read this book, you will probably hate the "Spring automagic" expression just as much as I do.
XML configuration snippets were kept here in there to help people new to Spring understand the old-style configuration as well. XML configuration is not a topic for the exam. But, in the real world if you end up working with a Spring project that was started years ago you might find XML configuration and will need to
be able to deal with it.
Cheers!