A long awaiting new edition of the most practical Spring Framework since 2014 is finally here, in late 2018. Quick to the point solutions and ready made examples fulfill this almost perfect code for every Java developer without a doubt. No wonder this book was a massive hit with over 100 thousands of sold items!
| Pages | 520 |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 28th November 2018 |
| Target Audience | Juniors (with some JAVA knowledge) Mids, Seniors |
| Author | Craig Walls |
| Category | JAVA, Spring, Frameworks |
Covered Subjects
Like every other good book it starts by outlining the general Spring principles, how the beans works and how they work. It talks about aspect-oriented Spring as well as web applications solutions like: rendering the views, MVC principles securing the corners and magic mechanism: Spring Web Flow. I’ve said magic, as you won’t need to fully understand it in more details anyway.
Later we get more into back-end side of things, for instance, persistence data with fun ORM, NoSQL solutions and by using Spring and JDBC. A focus is then shifted into more securing of the endpoints together with introducing various of cache mechanisms. The very end is mainly focus on integrations to work with remote services, REST, queue messaging and WebSockets. The desert is offering email sending, JMX management of beans and development with Spring Boot.
A bit too bad that introduction to Spring Framework isn’t a complete guide for newbies, but there are many of those entry-level tutorials on the web anyway.
Writing Style
This is a very an unique experience book, from one hand we have a tons of complex data to consume and understand, but from the other hand it’s all sprinkled with sugar of well introduced humor. Every chapter includes a short green section of: “This chapter covers” which really helps to prepare yourself with the content.
The indention on the left is too big in my personal opinion, and it’s just a waste of the paper. The font could be a bit bigger, but that’s the personal matter. The could margins between standard text is also a bit small, everything feels a bit too condensed and tight with each other. Easy to follow and read book even for a non-english native speaker, as author is using a common and non-bullshit language through the whole read. You will find here a lot of diagrams to better illustrate problems and work-flows. Code samples are truncated to more crucial parts, and that’s a very good solution, you have the rest of the examples in ZIP file anyway.
Examples
Every code samples are filled with doze of humor, this is a perfect example of how easier is to understand something which is presented in fun way. (This is why I recommend “Head First..” books for not just beginners in IT). In some places we get an arrow pointers in code sections, which helps to follow the bigger chunks of code, even though the author tries to avoid longer sections.
Summary
Fifth edition is a great addition to the previous titles, the book is not just refreshed with newer framework version but has some new sections covered. The main difference from previous version is the connecting Spring with Spring Boot, creating micro-services and bigger range of SQL and NoSQL databases.
The right humor at the right times, full enjoyment and a massive knowledge gain after the read, means that this paper is nearly perfect position for any readers. I would take off tiny points off, as previously bought editions of the book are not automatically updated so you need to keep buying the new versions (but hey at least the author has not abandoned his initial work).
Where to buy?
Latest 5th edition: Spring in Action Fifth Edition
I wouldn’t say that this book has any disadvantages, in my opinion it’s 5/5 without a doubt!