Rating:  - Not Good...
Other reviews have mentioned that there are many problems with the examples in this book. I can only reaffirm what they've said.
The other thing that I really didn't like was the disorganized fashion with which the examples were presented. The authors seemed to jump around describing one small section of the problem in great detail, then 3-4 pages later would give you the critical piece of information you needed to understand their example 3 pages before. I am a fan of examples that are logically presented:
First you do x,
Then you do y,
you configure x to point to y
now deploy it, type this in the url field, and there you go, it works.
I found these examples to be more like:
First you do x,
then let me tell you everything there is to know about x.
y is very important as well.
if you wanted to set up y you could do it like this.
of another popular way of configuring y is like this.
and then there's this thing called z.
z is also very important, and here's some more information about z.
But of course, before we can set up z, we need to configure x to point to y.
I'm sure you can figure out how to configure x and y.
that's it, we're done.
So when you're done reading you feel like you have increased your general knowledge of the subject, but you really don't know exactly what you're supposed to do to actually make something that works.
I also would have liked more information about using commons-validator with Spring MVC instead of so much detail on VaLang. This would have been especially helpful for people moving from Struts to Spring MVC.
Those are the negative aspects of the book. On a positive note, it is fairly well written. There is a lot of good information that will increase your general understanding of the MVC and WebFlow frameworks. I do use this book as a reference from time to time, and it has provided me some value in that respect.
Overall though, I do not recommend purchasing this book. I think you can get a better idea of the WebFlow framework just by using the documentation on Spring's website, downloading the framework and walking through the examples. As far as MVC I think this book is better in the MVC chapters than it is in the WebFlow chapters, but with the release of Spring 2.0 even those chapters are now out of date.
Rating:  - Very good, needs more on WebFlow
I had been developing within Spring MVC for about half a year before I purchased this book. The section on testing Spring MVC was a little sparse, and the authors should have introduced more examples on WebFlow. Otherwise, I think it's a great book with lots of applicable examples.
(One of my co-workers took this book home over the weekend, read this book and got completely up to speed on Spring MVC. He was very impressed with it.)
Rating:  - Not enough Form examples
There were not enough form examples. It is fine if you want to do binding with a text input form only, but if you want to do radio buttons, selects or hidden input boxes that have data already filled in, good luck! The code examples leave much to be desired.
Rating: - Unable to get Chapter 4 example to even work
I am so disappointed with this book, to say the least. I think it is very poorly edited.
Or maybe the book is not so bad, but I am unable to get my questions answered on support forums. If I were the author I would at least be monitoring a forum section devoted exclusively to this book, but no such luck.
While the explanation in the book seems OK, It looks like there is a lot left out in the code listings and illustrations. I am starting to think there is a section of chapter 4 missing from my printed copy.
Listing 4-3, page 45, I don't know if the authors wanted to call this class SearchFlights or FlightSearchCriteria. The confusion over the same issue continues in Listing 4-6, page 69, shows List findFlights(SearchFlights search);
when it should probably read List findFlights(FlightSearchCriteria search);
None of the Java listings give package declarations, you don't find out how to package this or what imports you need until you get to page 62, which shows a file layout. Fortunately I have been developing this in Eclipse, which has helped me find the imports.
That file layout on page 62, by the way, is missing the Airport class and introduces JSPs that haven't even been coded yet, nor has the SearchFlightsController Java class been developed yet.
I am not that much of a web development newbie - I've deployed web applications under Tomcat before. But I'm not finding either the book or the development community very helpful at this point.
Rating: - Source code doesn't compile
The book seems to be well written, however one reason I purchase computer books is to go through the examples and actually get the source code to compile. There's an unanswered enty in the Apress forum from July asking if anyone could get the source to compile. As I said it's not answered so apparently no one else could get the source to compile either. As I said in the forum if authors would simply include a jar file with the source this problem would not exist. Since the author used eclipse to generate the examples and since it's a simple mouse click in eclipse to do this, it must be laziness on the authors part. I'll change my rating once (if) the source code compiles.
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