Steven Cook said
I was tasked with having to learn the Spring framework and bought the book "Spring in Action" which.. though it was a very good book.. was sometimes a bit too disconnected at times from the example source code the book would refer to in very short and small snippets. As a result, though I felt I was learning the theoretical academics of Spring, I was hard pressed to feel like I could relate to it on a concrete coding level. As a result, I did my research on other Spring books and found this one. Armed with my cursory theoretical knowledge of Spring, this book was EXACTLY what I needed to connect the theory to actual coding practices and really brought it home in very practical terms. I should point out that a person could very easily learn Spring from just reading this book alone but I think that some up front base knowledge of how Spring works really makes this book shine. My recommendation is to simply read through Spring's tutorials first (online) and then read through this book. When you are done, you will be a Spring expert in no time flat!

Patrick M said
The best book on Spring out there from a beginners perspective, but still, I wish the author used Eclipse IDE and Junit and some pictures for helping with installation etc. But if you are looking for an easy to understand Spring book, this is the best in the market. Hope the author makes it as easy as the Hibernate made easy book by Cameron in a future edition.

Kaleb Brasee said
I've read most all of the major Spring books, and Spring Recipes is the best one. It starts at the beginning with a practical explanation of IoC and eventually covers nearly every feature that Spring offers in an extremely practical way. In addition to core Spring, major modules such as Spring Security and MVC are covered in depth as well. The source code examples are top-notch, simple yet complete enough to allow you to implement the functionality you're reading about. Spring Recipes is one of the most useful and best tech books I've ever read, if not the best.

L. Chung said
This book is a great companion to "Spring in Action". It was obviously written by someone who earned a living as Java developer and knew what other developers need when learning a new framework for their jobs. I liked the way the book is organized into three main sections, Core, Fundamentals and Advanced. Each section had self-evident no nonsense titles like "Inversion of Control and Containers" or "Spring Security".

I wish I had this book three years ago when I was learning to use the Spring framework. Instead, I had the ever self-indulgent "Spring: A Developer's Notebook", which was a complete waste of $30.

Taruvai Subramaniam said
This is THE book you should own if you are using Spring. It is organized as cookbook. I refer to it all the time. Very thorough and complete. Of course if you want a good introduction you should read Craig Walls book on Spring If you want to use Spring Web Services or Spring Security in a more than elementary way read the respective reference manuals.