Courtesy of Sebastian Stolarczyk from Warszawa JUG:



After having read Gary Mak's first Spring book (Spring Recipes) I became a fan of both Spring Framework as well as the writing style of his. Gary explained Spring in a very informative and easy to follow manner. When "Spring Enterprise Recipes" came out I couldn't resist giving it a try - and I wasn't (that much) disappointed.



"Spring Enterprise Recipes", as the title goes, is targeted towards Java developers working on designing and implementing enterprise-class solutions with Spring Framework. The book begins with an introduction to Spring platform - it explains how to instantiate the IoC container, declare beans within it, and introduces some basic concepts, i.e. aspect oriented programming (AOP) with Spring.



The first chapter is a real crash course as it describes lots of things in just 60 pages. I have personally found it concise and easy to read, so even if you're not quite familiar with the technology at hand, you won't have much trouble grasping the basics. Altough I must admit that it feels kind of rushed (concepts were explained more slowly in the previous book of Gary "Spring Recipes"). Take AOP as an example - you jump into AOP right after only a few lines of explanation what it's supposed to solve. Not much, really.



In the next chapter the authors introduce what's new in Spring 3.0 (the latest version of framework). This part of the book, despite being part of the Recipes series, concentrates more on presenting the technology with examples being a little too abstract. On the other hand, this chapter does a good job on explaining what's new, especially if you're aware of how you have done things in the previous versions of Spring. After the first two chapters, things begin to be more problem-specific.



I basically liked the rest of the book, but I'm not that thrilled as I was after reading the first "Spring Recipes" book. What's great about "Spring Enterprise Recipes" is its formula. In each chapter you're introduced to a problem, and then the authors show you how to go about it from the very beginning to its end. The examples are simple, albeit they successfully address the core of the issue. As I said earlier, they are easy to follow even for a not-so-geek Spring programmer (assuming he/she understood the core concepts). Issues like transactions, data access, remoting, messaging and web services are all deeply covered. Personally I only didn't like the last two or three chapters (Distributed Spring, jBPM and OSGi); after reading them it felt a little incomplete - they were just introductions to very broad topics. What's interesting is the authors even suggest that you should get some additional books on these concepts. Besides that, they did explain what Spring has in stock to deal with those things, altough the benefits of using Spring in that areas weren't that obvious to me. Maybe if the authors spent some extra pages it would become clearer.



"Spring Enterprise Recipes" was a decent read, but not a must-have like "Spring Recipes". On the pro side: lots of recipes are generic enough to even copy and paste code fragments and use them in your work as a basis to begin coding, almost every issue you'll be facing at enterprise development is covered. You have to be aware however that this book is designed to address common enterprise issues (batch processing, integration, business process management), not web application programming with Spring (Spring MVC, REST). If you're interested in the latter, you should buy "Spring Recipes" first, or wait for "Spring Web Recipes". On the cons side: no web programming (which is also needed in enterprise environment!), some chapters seemed a bit rushed, and some left you hungry for more, esp. real-life recipes. It was worth its time, nevertheless.

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