Pro Spring 2.5: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Pro Spring 2.5 covers the new 2.5 additions to the Spring framework. The table of contents is viewable from the Apress web site.

The Good:

• In addition to the new core framework features (JDBC, AOP, remoting, transaction management) they also included chapters about Spring MVC, Spring Web Flow, JMX, testing, and performance tuning.


• The authors do a good job of including introductory content for new Spring users. In fact, the first eight chapters (Part I) were targeted towards users getting started with Spring.


• The author's explain many of the new features in great detail and had code examples for nearly everything. However, there are some gaps in their code examples.


• If you are a fan of Josh Bloch's puzzler's then you will definitely enjoy some of the code examples. The disappointing point is that these were not intentional mistakes! If you do not like puzzlers, then move this one to the bad and ugly category.

The Bad and Ugly:

• The source code examples in this book contained many typos and copy-paste errors. More than I had ever seen an any book previously. Unfortunately, this may cause confusion for new Spring users.

My recommendation (3.9 stars out of 5):
I originally preordered this book based on the reputation of the first Pro Spring book. That book was very good and it had great reviews to back it up. Despite the typo's, I have found value in this book. I have given brown bags on the new features of Spring, Spring MVC, and Spring Web Flow and I gathered most of my content from this book. This book has been a good compliment to the Spring reference documentation. However, If you can't tolerate an occasional typo then you may want to avoid this book completely.