I like the style of the book but I found myself having to play around with code to get the examples to work. They seemed to work about 25% of the time without major tweaking. Maybe it is just me but this book needs a newer edition pronto. I'd look elsewhere for more up to date information.

I bought this book to get understanding of POJOs. To see how they are much simpler to use than EJB, if they really are!!
But this book tries to pack the whole project into it, which makes it hard to remember things after few chapters. It also tries to explain technologies (like Spring and Tapestry) in few pages, omitting the explanations where required. My opinion is, it requires pre-understanding of these technologies before you will find reading this book useful.

Also, I was not convinced with writing style of author. Author tries to use complex words where they can be avoided and twisted sentences where same thing can be explained in plain English statements.

Overall, I guess author has in-depth knowledge but he lacks the ability to express the knowledge in simple words

If you are just starting to see what the lightweight framework application hubbub is about this is the best introductory book on the subject that I have read.

I purchased this book, got distracted by another project and only recently picked it up to read the chapter on Spring. I read the Introduction, became hooked by the authors very natural and readable narrative style and soon I had read the entire book. That is unusual.

The author has chosen a unique Technical Conference Application as a test case and described it's development in various light weight frameworks and applications.
The examples are bit dated by the use of Eclipse 3.1 but everything with the exception of an older version of SQL Explorer runs with Eclipse 3.2. If you are an experienced Spring - ORM developer your mileage may vary but chances are you will learn some new things.

This is a very big little book. Technologies covered in some depth with references are: Eclipse, Spring-MVC, Hibernate, Tomcat, Tapestry-HiveMind, JBoss, SQL Explorer, DynaDTO, Ajax with Tacos, TestNG and AspectJ along with discussions of several patterns and methods of Dependency Injection. The discussion and reasoning behind the use of the techniques is well thought out and insightful.

My only caveat is that the author and I belong to the same Java users group. I plan to leverage that personal contact to encourage Brian to write more books.

I should quote this book, but I really don't want to spend anymore time with it. The buzzword-speak is rife through this book, and it really hinders learning when you have to stop and think, 'Now what is that supposed to mean?'. I haven't learned much, and the only reason I don't give this 1 star is I got it for < $1 from amazon used. It had 3 1/2 stars when I bought it, and my new rule is not to shell out for anything less than 4 1/2.

I am a student just leave college for company in China,in my company, Hibernate+Spring+Tapestry are used,the best thing for me is being familiar with the framework soon.Then I found this book Beginning POJOSWhich is helpful for me.I am enjoying reading it,and I can do my job now.
Thank you Brian!Great job!