Pro Spring is not a blatant clone of the supplied documentation. Insteadthe authors gracefully introduce Spring by adopting a very pragmatic approach based on their real-world experiences with the framework.

— Valentin Crettaz, JavaRanch Bartender

Spring—the open source Java–based framework—allows you to build lighter, better performing applications. Written by Spring insiders Rob Harrop and Jan Machacek, Pro Spring is the only book endorsed by Rod Johnson, founder of the Spring Framework. At over 800 pages, this is by far the most comprehensive book available and thoroughly explores the power of Spring. You’ll learn Spring basics and core topics, as well as share the authors’ insights and real–world experience with remoting, mail integration, hibernate, and EJB.

From the Foreword: “Robs enthusiasm for Spring—and technology in general—is infectious. He has a wide range of industry experience and a refreshingly practical, common sense approach to applying it. All those qualities come out in this book. It’s evident on nearly every page that it reflects in–depth experience with Spring and J2EE as a whole. Rob is not only an author and open source developer—he is an application developer, like his readers. I firmly believe that the best writing on software development comes out of experience in the trenches, so this is my kind of book.

If you’re new to Spring, this book will help you understand its core concepts and the background in areas such as transaction management and O/R mapping that underpins them. If youre already using Spring, you will learn about features you haven’t yet seen and hopefully, gain a deeper understanding of those features youre already using.”
—Rod Johnson, Founder of the Spring Framework

About The Author
Rob Harrop is a software consultant specializing in delivering high-performance, highly-scalable enterprise applications. He is an experienced architect with a particular flair for understanding and solving complex design issues. With a thorough knowledge of both Java and .NET, Harrop has successfully deployed projects across both platforms. He also has extensive experience across a variety of sectors, retail and government in particular.



Harrop is the author of five books, including Pro Spring, a widely-acclaimed, comprehensive resource on the Spring Framework.



Harrop has been a core developer of the Spring Framework since June 2004 and currently leads the JMX and AOP efforts. He co-founded UK-based software company, Cake Solutions, in May 2001, having spent the previous two years working as Lead Developer for a successful dotcom start-up. Rob is a member of the JCP and is involved in the JSR-255 Expert Group for JMX 2.0.



Jan Machacek is a chief software architect at Cake Solutions Limited (www.cakesolutions.net), a UK-based software company. He has been an early adopter of Spring at Cake Solutions and has seen the dramatic change the Spring framework has brought to the Java world. As part of his job, Jan designs and oversees the development of majority of Cake's projects. Where appropriate, Jan also applies his interest in declarative programming and artificial intelligence. Throughout his programming career, Jan has designed and implemented large J2EE and .NET systems for the UK government and large private sector bodies. When not programming, Jan enjoys foreign languages; he also enters races and time trials as a member of the Manchester Wheelers' cycling club.

Customer Reviews & Comments
If you're reading this, you probably don't need to be convinced about learning Spring. The question you're really asking yourself is, which book should I buy? Or should I just stick with the online docs and save some money? Or should I just download the code and start playing with it? I'm going to try to answer those questions. First, Spring was born out of the thinking by Rod Johnson in "Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development", and later with this followup book co-authored with Juergen Hoeller in "Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB". These books are excellent books in general and I highly recommend them. However, the first book is not really about Spring and is more about general enterprise application development strategies (and very good at that). The second is sort a essay on why EJB has failed, and also a short introduction to Spring along with the philosophy behind the design decision in Spring. However, it's too sparse to be a full-fledged Spring manual or tutorial. It's more a well-argued anti-EJB book with a short tour guide to Spring. In contrast, Rob Harrop (who is also a Spring developer) has written the first truly comprehensive introduction and tutorial to Spring. It covers the whole gamut, from a clear introduction to why Dependency Injection makes a lot of sense, on Aspect Oriented Programming and how it applies to Spring, then on to a detailed coverage of how to use Spring for persistence, transactions, remoting, messaging, scheduling, email, and MVC web applications. He shows how to integrate with Hibernate, iBATIS, JDBC, JTA, JMS, Quarts, Struts, Velocity, etc. What's amazing is that it covers Spring 1.2, which is still in release candidate stage, and gives you updates on the current stage of various supporting software, what to watch for in the near future and what the changes will most likely be. Just as one example, the Spring IDE plugin to Eclipse has really no online documentation to speak of since it's still relatively new, but this book shows you how to get it, install it, use it. The book has better documentation than the canonical website. That's just one example of many. So how does this compare with the online docs for Spring? The online docs are good in most places, but there are still some big gaps in the documentation, whereas this book is nothing but exhaustive in its coverage and clearly superior in most places compared to the online-docs. I've read both of Rod Johnson's books, the online docs and Rob Harrop's book, and this book is probably the best out there right now for its coverage of Spring, and it's also a one-stop shop. You don't really need anything else, unless you're looking to expand your knowledge with the other books into areas outside of Spring. The only other book that might come close is the (as yet) unpublished book by Rod Johnson titled "Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework". However, that book is not out yet, so unless you can stall your Spring development for many months (hah, hah), I highly recommend Rob Harrop's book. Be productive and just get it. Comment | Permalink | (Report this)