Rating:  - Web Flow lightly covered
I bought this book with the hope of getting a better idea of how I should build the Web Flow flows in my Grails ( [...]) application. I know it is my own fault, and that I should have more carefully read the excellent reviews of this book, but I was a little disappointed to discover Web Flow was the topic in just two of twelve chapters when it is approximately 50% of the book's title.
If anyone knows a good source of reference on how to design Web Flow flows so that my web app has a nice natural user experience (e.g. able to use the browser 'back' button having gone though a flow's end state without getting in a mess) then please let me know. I want to aim for the sort of experience I have when using the amazon dot com shopping cart, not the sort of experience I have when using an ERP solution. So far with Web Flow my efforts have tended towards ERP quality :(
Rating:  - Great book when Spring WebFlow was just being released
The book was great pre-release book, but like most programming books for specific frameworks becomes almost useless within a few months
Rating:  - Poorly organized and obsolete
I completely agree with the reviewer who points out how almost chaotically the information is delivered in this book - for the most part. Generally, you need to skip from section to section and back a few times before you can get all the pieces together. That's unacceptable. It's impossible to use this book as a convenient reference since each example generally provides only partial answers, and you have to scan back and forth through the pages to look for the clarification on the missing pieces. Often, the coverage is quite superficial. The official Spring Reference Guide on the Spring site does not get into too much detail on Spring MVC, leaving out lots of important and interesting details. Nevertheless, much more - and better - information is indeed available on-line today - at no cost. I haven't yet seen a perfect one-stop source for Spring MVC, but this book is definitely a waste of money. It may have been okay a couple of years ago when much less info was available online, but certainly not today.
The only part of this book that is very well written is the chapters on Spring Web Flow. Indeed, it appears that the chapters were written by someone other than the authors of the rest of the book. Someone who understood and appreciated the importance of a very thoughtfully organized FLOW of any sequence of logical steps, be it a software application, or a flow of information such as an instructions manual, or a tutorial. That's why Colin Yates, the apparent main contributor to Chapters 11 and 12 (on Spring Web Flow), does a much better job than the rest of the authors. Unfortunately, those Web Flow chapters are largely obsolete today. Some code in the book won't work. You'll immediately see that the classes in the org.springframework.webflow.test package you get with your latest Webflow distribution differ from the ones used in the book's examples. What's even worse is that the flow configuration XML files in the examples apparently use the old/obsolete XML schema. That means you shouldn't use them as examples for your own code. Just compare the code from the latest Spring [on-line] Reference Guide and the examples in the book and you will instantly see the difference.
For a very good introduction to Spring Web Flow, see the Spring Reference Guide (http://static.springframework.org/spring-webflow/docs/1.0.x/reference/introduction.html) and the article by the author of Spring Web Flow at http://www.ervacon.com/products/swf/intro/index.html, which is excellent.
Do not waste money on this book! Honestly. ;)
Rating: - Material is worthy of a strong 4 stars, but poor editing makes it 3
The book provides really good information and I was able to build out an application after reading it. The only problem is the editing and I hope a 2nd edition is released with fixes and updates for Spring 2.0. There are good PDF presentations out there that give a quick overview and one good tutorial that's a working example. I would google for those and read them alongside with this book.
Rating:  - Great fiction
As computer books continue their never ending slide into the abyss, Apress and Manning seem to be leading the way. This book is one of the best works of fiction ever written. From incomplete and non-working examples to the many errors, the publishers would be better served by pulling this tome off the market and starting over. There is nothing "expert" in this text nor is there anything the least bit helpful. Well, ok, I will admit the UML diagrams are nice.
Avoid this book at all costs.
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