It was an easy and pleasant job to write a review for this “Spring in Action” book. Though it’s almost three years old it’s still considered to be one best book about the Spring framework. My opinion might be not too poetic, albeit I’ve enjoyed reading the book.
Every Jvm-concerned programmer knows that Spring is huge and it’s constantly evolving throughout all these years. There are some books that are much thicker and they cover more Spring components. Some of them are really gigantic manuscripts. But what is the point? As I said Spring is evolving, the Api is changing all the time. By all means these manuscripts will be mostly outdated by the next major release. What was the Chris Walls’ solution?
This book covers only the Core concepts of Spring:DI, AOP, security, web tier, messaging etc. It inspires you to think how to solve this or that problem that you encounter in a Spring-esque way. It doesn’t provide a solution for every problem, it provides the way of thinking that solves it flawlessly. It gives fish tool? Instead of a fish.
By the way using Spring in Scala is not so painful as you might be concerned. Some concepts are useless (like dependency injection, velocity integration) but things like templates can do much for keeping your sanity.
My score for this book is 5/5