Overall, Spring in Action (SIA) is an excellent book, well worth buying. Here are my impressions after having studied (in a group) several portions of the book a little while ago:

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Pros are:
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- SIA contains many memorable source code examples that help the concepts stick in one's mind.
- Very much in the tradition of books from Manning publishers, the print quality is pleasing, and the book lays flat nicely for easy reading. In this aspect, it's right up there with the book "Code Craft: The Practice of Writing Excellent Code" by Pete Goodliffe (Publisher: No Starch Press), which, by the way, is another eminently readable, useful book. This is in stark contrast with the book "Eclipse Distilled" by David Carlson (Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional). While the content quality of "Eclipse Distilled" is very good, the print quality is poor (I'm all for printing on recycled paper, but not on shoddy recycled paper) and the binding inferior -- Try keeping the book "Eclipse Distilled" lying open on a flat surface, and it'll spring [sic - no pun intended in connection with the book I'm reviewing] shut like a steel trap; so much easy reading :-( But SIA is not like that at all and, in sum, excels in this respect.
- The basics are covered very well -- Dependency Injection and AOP, solving persistence problems, handling asynchronous messaging -- It's all in here!

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Cons are:
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- In more places than I care to count, SIA tends to have a rambling style.
- Hand-in-hand with the rambling style -- while an excellent tutorial that's worth studying and owning -- SIA is not eminently suitable as a reference. But for that we can always go to the ubiquitous online Spring API.

I've managed to get through the first six chapters in two weeks. Although the writing style is readable for a technical book there is a glaring lack of examples other than dangling code snippets that show how to actually use Spring. The code I downloaded from the book's web site is largely incoherent and undocumented.

I did manage to find several online tutorials that have been a lot more help. I recommend finding one that you like before attempting to wade past the first four chapters.

I am a great fan of struts framework and have been looking out for Spring Framework from quite some time. Did lot of search on internet but was not able to find much information.

This book gave me exactly what I needed and it helped me in understanding n appreciating the concepts and simplicity of Spring Framework.

I enjoyed the first edition and this one is equally good. I would like more information about MVC (or a Spring MVC in action book) but anyway it's highly recommendable. I hope they update it soon to Spring 2.5.

This book is exactly what you would expect from the In Action Series. The book is thorough and comprehensive. I even thought it had a slightly more personal writing style than some other In Action books.