Rating:  - Good Intro to Spring, Not Enough Examples
This book gives a good introduction to the Spring Framework, Aspect-Oriented Programming, and Inversion of Control on a whole. However, for a framework that many people will be using for web development, this book has only one chapter on Spring MVC; much of the implementation details are left up to the reader to discover on his/her own.
If you are looking for an overview of the Spring Framework and some of its basic implementations, this book is a good start. If you are looking for a "cookbook" with detailed examples, you would be better off searching the forums and newsgroups online.
Rating:  - Too wordy, not enough hands-on
I'm sure this book does an excellent job of reviewing all the possible uses of each component of Spring. Unfortunately, I couldn't stay awake long enough to find out. I love reading technical manuals, but this thing is a real snooze-fest. The repetition is high, especially in the early chapters. This book also suffers from what I call Full Spec Syndrome. Rather than learning the concepts involved, the author goes to great lengths to show all the options. Later he says one is used a vast majority of the time. Then why waste my time with the other options at this point? List them, yes, but full definitions of everything makes for an unreadable guide.
It is obvious that the authors know the material. However, in my opinion, they are not effective at imparting that knowledge to the reader.
Post script: I've had this book now for several months since I wrote the review above. Although I stand by my original review that this is not a book to LEARN Spring, it has been an excellent REFERENCE on Spring once you have the basics down.
Rating:  - Good introduction to all aspects of Spring
This book covers all aspects of Spring framework. I like it. It serves me as a quick reference guide. It is good for starter. But if you want to dig deeper and already have experience with Spring then you should look elsewhere.
Rating:  - One of the best Spring books out there. But....
This is a really great book on Spring, and very easy to read. However, the buyer should be aware that it is based on prior versions of Spring (and Hibernate). The book covers Spring v1.1, and Hibernate v2. The current releases (as of Jan 2007) are Spring v2, and Hibernate v3.
There have been many interesting improvements in Spring v2 work noting. You can read about them online here at the Spring Framework site:
[...]
I also wrote a blog-entry on what I had to do in order to get the SpringBlog sample-app from the book to work with the latest versions of Spring/Hibernate here. If you are in the same boat as me, take a look at this..it may save you some headaches...
[...]
If/When "Pro spring 2" gets published - I would buy it all over again!
Rating: - Well organised and sensible level of detail.
I was new to Spring when I got this book, but it bootstrapped me into the basics very quickly - I found its explanations provided insight above and beyond the material available in the online documentation (important to know because that's already pretty good).
I liked this book a great deal; it is intelligently laid out, with somewhat self-contained chapters on the various technologies incorporated into Spring. Even with a couple of fairly intensive Spring-related projects under my belt I'm still using it as an occasional reference and to get new team members up to speed.
Chapters on a few topics are a little light, but I think that's inevitable - the book's already 800+ pages long, and some briefly-covered products for which Spring provides wrappers have justified books in their own right.
Definitely recommended.
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