Best guide to Spring!

I'm a college student who just finished his second year. College programming (sorting, data structures, nachos, networks) is much different than application programming. I needed to learn Spring and fast. After spending almost a week on dozens of online Spring tutorials without much making sense, I decided to pick this book. The author uses a good deal of abstraction to guide you through and show you how different features of Spring work, and not only how they work but why you would use them. It's start of with a basic overview and then goes deeper into dependency injection, abstract-oriented programming, etc. For example, in the chapter on AOP, the author starts by giving a great and detailed explanation with examples of AOP terminology (advice, joinpoints, pointcuts, etc.) and then dives into the actual implementation. He starts off with one implementation and then shows the more sleeker AspectJ pointcuts and the ProxyFactoryBean. At this point the reader knows exactly what is going on, and the question isn't about how to make it work but choosing the better implementation model and the author at this point introduces @AspectJ and the element for your XML file. Keep in mind I'm some one completely new to ALL of this material. It's true there is a ton of information to grasp in at once, but the author builds and builds on the more basic concepts. I started reading last night, and I just reached part 2 of the book on Enterprise Spring. If you want to learn Spring, don't spend too much time looking at online tutorials. All they did was tell me to "click here, type this, run that, ... "etc without simple explanations of what is really going on or why any of this helps and is practical.

Other Reviews

• (2nd Edition) no source from Chapter5, 6,7, 10, 11,12, 13, 14, and 15.
• So far, so good
• Applause
• Best guide to Spring!
• Good book but with not enough examples