Comments about oreilly Spring: A Developer's Notebook:

The Developer's Notebook concept promises to be a good way to get up to speed quickly on a new topic: rather than plough through a lot of theory, instead one can build something from scratch based on coding examples. Unfortunately, that promise relies on the presupposition that the coding examples in the book have actually been tested out and work, which in the case of this book is not true.

It seems an irony that when one of the strong points of Spring is its testability that the coding examples in this book are such a mess, and have obviously not been tested. As at September 2008, a great deal of the errata have been applied in the edition which I have bought, but there are still gaps and inconsistencies, and I still spent more time fixing the coding examples than learning about Spring. There are also inaccuracies in the downloadable source files, which in addition contain unnecessary dependencies on the authors' directory layout.

The book is particularly weak on library dependencies and the Ant builds supplied make no attempt to address these, or actually build working WAR files.

If O'Reilly want to retain this book in their catalogue they should hand it to a third party and get the coding examples and the downloadable source files fixed by actually trying them out from scratch.

While they are at it they could usefully remove Bruce Tate's tedious folksy ramblings about kayaking and mountain bikes, which add nothing to the book.

Comments about oreilly Spring: A Developer's Notebook:

Hi,

I read and deployed first 4 chapters of this book and gave up reading on this book. When I bought this book I was impressed by Rod Johnson's praising Bruce A. Tate particularly for his style of sports commentary .. but I found http://static.springframework.org/docs/Spring-MVC-step-by-step/part1.html the best.

This includes the examples with necessary explaination too.

I would say do not buy this book.

Comments about oreilly Spring: A Developer's Notebook:

Other than the first few trival examples in the first chapter, the authors made very little effort to ensure you could run and use the examples in this book.

The downloadable build files contain hard-coded paths to the author's personal directory structure. You'll need to sort through the ANT build files and make a LOT of changes to make them actually work on your development system.

If you like/need working examples in a book, don't buy this one!

Comments about oreilly Spring: A Developer's Notebook:

I think this book depends on the reader's background with Java.

This book will probably suit people that is fairly new to Java and wants to get to grip with Spring ASAP. Each chapter is structured in the format: "how we usually do it without spring", "why don't we try", "how do we do that", "insert example", "what just happened", then repeat the cycle to "how we do that" which couldn't in my opinion be simpler.

There are errors in examples in the book, there's no excuses as the amount of error exists in nearly every example which is insane for a book published by O'Reilly of all people. However in fairness they did release a PDF pointing out all the errors in the book and correction and most importantly they do have the example files for download so you shouldn't need to type everything out in the first place. The examples for download contains all the corrections.

Both of which is available here at O'Reilly site under "Examples", it also contains a .jar folder for most of the .jar you'll need.

Writing this in 2008, the versions of framework that it talks about is a little out of date though, so when you download the frameworks you need to make adjustments to the .jar filenames in all the ant script it provides (its not hard, just something you need to do to get every example running).

Sorry for long post, just wanted to write a fair review after reading a few negative ones mostly dwelling on the example errors. This is a well written, down to earth book that aims to get you to grip with Spring concepts in no time, providing you already know the pains of Java without Spring.

Comments about oreilly Spring: A Developer's Notebook:

If you want to learn Spring, I recommend NOT to buy this book. You are wasting your time to figure out what is now missing in the example instead of learning Spring.

Comments about oreilly Spring: A Developer's Notebook:

The begining of the book was very good written, but by the next usual step - when you want to try the sample codes in the book you will get very soon angry. Cause nothing works like it should. Many mistakes, bugs. After the 3 chapter a "finished" the book. When you are a beginner, you want to try everything. But it is not possible with this notebook.

Comments about oreilly Spring: A Developer's Notebook:

I am a new spring learner. When I read it at the beginning, I found it very helpful to build the concept, and learnt the refactor methodology. Unfortunately, the example codes were so poorly tested and could not work. I became very frustrated and disappointed. So I decided to find an alternative book for my learning.

It could be a great book for new learners if the codes can be reviewed.

Comments about oreilly Spring: A Developer's Notebook:

These authors are masters! Bruce, by taking kayak example takes the reader into the world Spring. He creates interest in the reader. I was just surfing, and found this treasure in oreilly site, and read the first sample chapter off the internet, and I ordered instantly! I got it in 2 days, and I finished the book in about a week's time. Guesss what, I am glad I read this book. I am looking to find a simialr book for Hibernate now!!

Comments about oreilly Spring: A Developer's Notebook:

I bought this book with great hopes of learning about Spring. It was concise to the point .. something i like.

Unfortunately the examples in the book are filled with mistakes. If it was a problem with spellings it would have been OK, unfortunately the code doesn't deploy on the supposed environments.

The only thing the book did was give me an incentive to learn Spring. The spring documentation is a much better source of information .. and it is FREEE

Comments about oreilly Spring: A Developer's Notebook:

I am having the exact same problems with the book. Although the information about Spring in general is helpful and useful, a lot of the example code in the book is incorrect or incomplete and is making this book very difficult to use.