Needs to be reissued with working example code

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Book:		Spring: A Developer's Notebook
Subject:		Needs to be reissued with working example code
Date:		2008-09-14 03:44:49
From:		Merlin Cox

Rating: The Developer's Notebook concept promises to be a good way to get up to speed quickly on a new topic: rather than plough through a lot of theory, instead one can build something from scratch based on coding examples. Unfortunately, that promise relies on the presupposition that the coding examples in the book have actually been tested out and work, which in the case of this book is not true. It seems an irony that when one of the strong points of Spring is its testability that the coding examples in this book are such a mess, and have obviously not been tested. As at September 2008, a great deal of the errata have been applied in the edition which I have bought, but there are still gaps and inconsistencies, and I still spent more time fixing the coding examples than learning about Spring. There are also inaccuracies in the downloadable source files, which in addition contain unnecessary dependencies on the authors' directory layout. The book is particularly weak on library dependencies and the Ant builds supplied make no attempt to address these, or actually build working WAR files. If O'Reilly want to retain this book in their catalogue they should hand it to a third party and get the coding examples and the downloadable source files fixed by actually trying them out from scratch. While they are at it they could usefully remove Bruce Tate's tedious folksy ramblings about kayaking and mountain bikes, which add nothing to the book.