Book review: Spring Enterprise Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

Z Jacek Laskowski - Wiki Projektanta Java EE

Spring Enterprise Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach By Gary Mak, Josh Long (Apress, December 2009)

Tame yet fine to brush up on enterprise Spring

The book "Spring Enterprise Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach" By Gary Mak and Josh Lon is certainly one of the very few books I could read that were as much exciting as boring. Hate it or love it, but you gotta read it before you face an issue with Spring and you need a solution in a matter of seconds. I seem to think that buying its electronic version (pdf possibly) could boost the process of finding a solution greatly, although I couldn't experience it myself as I've been given a paper copy.

The first two, three chapters were quite an entertaining reading. I had never read such a book as a serie of problem-solution-how-it-works sections and I did enjoy it very much. It didn't last too long though - after a few other chapters it turned out very boring and largely dragged on. The topic of the book - Spring Framework and its enterprise ecosystem made up of Hibernate, JPA, EJB3, XFire, Quartz, ActiveMQ, Terracotta, GridGain, JBoss jBPM and OSGi - can pose a challenge to present in 450 pages. The authors made every effort to keep me focused, but what made the book interesting at first became its killer. In my opinion the writing style to be a serie of problem-solution-how-it-works sections should not be the foundation for a whole book. It didn't work out in this case. Just turn a page and you're in a different world of questions and answers which sounds good, but to me being questioned with not much detailed answers isn't very effective learning approach. It's not something I would fancy finding in another book.

I wouldn't be entirely honest saying I didn't find the book valuable. I did...partialy. Some of the projects presented in the book were quite new to me and having a quick glance at available tools and projects was very appealing. With no doubt the book allowed me to brush up on the features of Spring which make it the platform in some use cases. As an added benefit I could learn a bit about the other projects and technologies for which Spring provides many simplifications.

Reading the book is kind of reading a dictionary. It's definitely possible and lets you expand your overall knowledge on a topic but quickly becomes a very boring activity. I wouldn't recommend reading the book from cover to cover. It's one of the book you should have around while taming Spring. It can be a valuable source of answers in a form of code samples.