Introducing Spring Framework: A Primer Paperback – January 1, 2014

Seems to lack substance. Only barely shows you how to do things without much deeper explanation. Good for beginners to things like spring

Excellent book that shows you in a simple way and practical examples how to build an application with Spring Framework. The examples provided are very understandable and easy to perform, so they are a great resource to further extend the knowledge provided by the publication. If you want to enter the world of Spring, I would highly recommend this book. How to integrate Sprint with MongoDB I found very interesting as well as the creation of REST APIs.

I have given this book 3 stars as I'm neutral in my review. It's a book that is a bottom-up style (it makes you do stuff and you figure out what's going on) instead of top down (teaching you the theory and getting you to understand the concepts and then giving you snippets so you can understand the concepts and build your own app).I prefer a top down book and hence this book is not for me. If you're a very hands on kind of person and learn by doing, this might work for you. However, the lack of a solid theoretical foundation cannot be overlooked.I have skimmed through the book for a few hours and hence this is not a detailed review.This is what the book provides and does not provide.The entire book seems to build an application based on Spring. The book does a good job on being up to date with technology and uses Spring 4 along with Spring Boot as well as gradle ( a build tool based on Maven) and groovy as well as MongoDB, BeanShell and a bit of Ruby. No prior knowledge of these is needed and the book shows you just what you need to know so you can keep pace.So the first chapter gets you to write the traditional "Hello world" and then takes off after that.The entire book spends time in developing a document repository and includes the standard CRUD methods for handling a repository.The entire code on how to design and build this Spring based application is given in the book (and can be downloaded as well) so if the reader faithfully follows all the steps, he will have a functioning application.So by following the text and coding, the reader can get to understand the one application that this entire book puts together.The reasons the book doesn't work for ME:1. I would like a strong theoretical foundation before getting into details.2. There are too many other technologies (Ruby, groovy, gradle, MongoDB etc). This could be good or bad, since the Spring framework is so extensive. I would have preferred a book that sticks to the minimally needed technologies to show what Spring can support.3. I would prefer small examples about each topic instead of one gargantuan application over the entire book. The downside of building a big application one step at a time, chapter over chapter, is that it makes it difficult to jump to a specific topic to get to know it.

There are books on Spring 3 but I wanted to try this out to learn about features on Spring 4 and Spring Boot. I downloaded the example source code and right from the beginning on the very first example I had to spend an hour and a half trying to get it to work. Had to monkey with the Gradle scripts to get it to work (I'm not currently fluent with Gradle so the lack of instructions in the book was frustrating). Ok, move on to second example which immediately shows a typo within the first 10 pages, not a regular typo but one which is to be run at the command-prompt. Again, will not work! At this point I realize I'll waste more time trying to follow the examples and get them working than actually learning anything. Cannot recommend this book to anyone due to the fact I don't believe it was really reviewed that well before releasing for publication.

This book gives very good introduction to spring framework and covers the new concepts of spring framework very well. The concepts are explained in a simple and easy to follow way. I would recommend this book to all readers who are new to spring framework and readers who like to familiarize with new concepts in spring framework family.

This book logically lays out how to work within the Spring framework and shows some of the new features of Spring 4 and the new Spring Boot. The examples are straightforward and understandable. I would recommend this to beginners new to the Spring ecosystem.

A very informative primer useful for understanding the power of Spring.

Not a bad book but the examples could be better and I believe there could be better implementation in some occasions (I do understand that the author tries to show different ways of doing the same thing, but still ...)