There are quite a few books on spring framework in the wild and since I have read every one of them, I take the privilege to say that this book is not the best among them.
If you are a beginner; please stay away from this book. If you already know spring and want to add to your knowledge, then read on.
I was eagerly awaiting this book for 2 reasons.
1. One of the co-authors is Rod Johnson (creator of spring)
2. Almost none of the spring books in the market covered Spring MVC well
I have read Rod's previous books (J2EE Design and Development && J2EE Development without EJB). Both of them are classics, and deservedly so. Naturally, I expected the same quality from this book as well. Sadly, my expectation was wrong, and this book comes nowhere close to the quality of his previous works. This might be partly because, he wrote only a couple of chapters.
Secondly, I anticipated some coverage of the forthcoming spring 2.0 release. I imagine, this is a reasonable expectation because, this book came very late to the market, and it would make sense to cover a few more new features. Sadly, nothing more than "spring 1.2" is covered.
Thirdly, though this book's TOC contains some impressive topics not covered by other books, (like Acegi security), the coverage is pretty shallow and not well written either. This is a very poor combination to learn an advanced concept. So, the chapter is there, just making the TOC impressive. I didn't gain much penetration into "Acegi Security" from that chapter.
Is the coverage of basics good? I don't think so. But, this is the only part; they have at least attempted some comprehensiveness.
As usual, Spring MVC receives second class treatment although 3 full chapters are dedicated to cover it. This is the same with almost all spring books in the market. So, if you want to understand the full power of Spring MVC then, I would recommend, full-fledged books like "Expert Spring MVC and Web flow".
Another annoying fact is that, the authors refer back to Rod's other 2 books for many important concepts, leaving the reader hanging in mid air, especially, if you are a beginner.
Last, but not the least, When I was reading a few advanced concepts from this book, I felt a lot like reading the spring online documentation. So, I went to the documentation to check if my intuition is correct. It comes as no surprise that, there was a good deal of copy-paste. This may not be a very bad thing, because today's technology books are merely a consolidation of online documentation with interesting examples, practical use-cases and some of the author's experience combined. So, this fact is acceptable, but, still, I wanted to point this out.
Overall, from my point of view, I didn't find any real value from this book. So, beginners stay away, but experienced may use it as a reference.
