BOOKS: any recommendation?

[toadie]

Of the 5 or 6 books listed in the Books Section, if you were to buy one, which one would you recommend?

The developer reader profile for the book is:

1. Fluent in Java / J2EE dev (JBoss specifically) (5 years)
2 Understand IoC concept
3. Have read through the majority of Spring one line document
4. Have played around with the Spring examples

Now I am ready to build my app using Spring (kewl stuff). What I am looking for leans more towards the practical side of app development in Spring rather than 'How was Spring Framework architected'.

If you have bought one or more books, i'd love to hear your reviews (both negative as well as positive)

If you DO reply, please let me know if you are also kinda fit with the reader profile above

Thanks.

[katentim]

Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development is excellent from an architectural point of view. There's lots of usefull architecture information in that. I would certainly recommend it, but maybe not for the reasons you gave.

Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB builds on the above and is more Spring oriented.

I bought Pro Spring, for the reasons you gave above and found it to be excellent. Unfortunately I haven't read any of the other (what I gather are competing in this area) books such as Spring Live, Spring In Action and Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework. I've heard good things about the first two, but found Pro Spring to be too good to buy a similar title. Haven't heard anything about the last book, but given who wrote in, and their experience and previous books, I expect it to be excellent as well.

[wpoitras]

I bought Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB and I found it helpful. It helps you understand the various J2EE technoligies for creating stateless services, including Spring. I had read it after fiddling with Spring and reading the forums for several weeks, and I still found it useful. However it wasn't 100% practical application with Spring, since it touched on non-Spring J2EE technolgies as well. You might still find parts of it too conceptual. You might want to see if you can browse a copy before you buy it.

[rstearns01]

I concur with Tim's recommendations. I also prefer Pro Spring for the "how-to"s (but haven't seen Professional Java Development yet).

Spring in Action I thought was too shallow a treatment. I borrowed Spring Live from a co-worker who liked that it had "more pictures" (UML diagrams), but there are plenty of those in the Expert One-on-One ... books. It had examples, but they were short, used different domains/use cases, and I found it hard to find things.

[jbetancourt]

I have Pro Spring and Professional java Development with the Spring Framework they are both excellent.

[sandipdk]

Yes the book "PRO Spring" is indeed a good book.....

[toadie]

Thanks to all who replied. I've got an order into Amazon for Pro Spring

Thanks.