Agile Java™ Development With Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse is a book about robust technologies and effective methods which help bring simplicity back into the world of enterprise Java development. The three key technologies covered in this book, the Spring Framework, Hibernate and Eclipse, help reduce the complexity of enterprise Java development significantly. Furthermore, these technologies enable plain old Java objects (POJOs) to be deployed in light-weight containers versus heavy-handed remote objects that require heavy EJB containers. This book also extensively covers technologies such as Ant, JUnit, JSP tag libraries and touches upon other areas such as such logging, GUI based debugging, monitoring using JMX, job scheduling, emailing, and more. Also, Extreme Programming (XP), Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD) and refactoring are methods that can expedite the software development projects by reducing the amount of up front requirements and design; hence these methods are embedded throughout the book but with just enough details and examples to not sidetrack the focus of this book. In addition, this book contains well separated, subjective material (opinion sidebars), comic illustrations, tips and tricks, all of which provide real-world and practical perspectives on relevant topics. Last but not least, this book demonstrates the complete lifecycle by building and following a sample application, chapter-by-chapter, starting from conceptualization to production using the technology and processes covered in this book. In summary, by using the technologies and methods covered in this book, the reader will be able to effectively develop enterprise-class Java applications, in an agile manner!

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 45 reviews)

General Overview of Agile Java Development

I felt like the book basically defines terminology and gives a broad overview of the three technologies. I agree with the reviews that said he tried to do too much, in this book. One solution would have been to drop the Eclipse section, thus giving him more space to write about Hibernate and Spring. Besides everything about Eclipse is well documented, for free. I also agree with the reviews that did not like his writing style. I feel that when I am just begining to learn about something new, I don't want to read about all of the exceptions. Only after I know the basics, would the exceptions be helpfull. However, I did get enough general information to begin learning Hibernate and Spring, through other books. That in combination with the fact that the book was heavily discounted, enabled me to feel like I didn't do too bad. I am afraid if I would have paid full price I might have dropped the rating to one star. The cost benefit ratio would have been different.
September 08, 2008

More a Manifesto for Agile Development than a tutorial...

This book tries to cover too many things. The book is more a Manifesto for Agile Development from an experienced programmer than a technical book.

Thus this small book misses all the details any technical person would like to see. The book is definitely not a comprehensive API guide to Spring or Hibernate, nor does it intend to be. The author repeatedly said : "more to come later" or "we'll see this in later chapter" etc. But that moment never arrived...

The books can be used to get an overall idea for a manager or a programmer who is totally a newbie to the concepts.

The more interesting part is on Agile Development where it seems to be a Manifesto but definitely not a tutorial.
February 15, 2008

Do not purchase this book if you don't need a 250 page resume!

I can not believe how anybody who has read this book would honestly give it a 5 star. I read the whole book, waiting for that moment that I could say: Oh, that's what the author meant by repeatedly saying: "more to come later" or "we'll see this in later chapter" etc. That moment never arrived. This book looks like a hurried and lousy compilation of 5 day presentations on each subject that this books claims to cover, without proper editing and attention to detail.
I read the book riding the metro in Washington DC and I can honestly say that I would rather see DC tourists block the left side of the escalators in the metro stations on a busy rush hour day than read or refer to this book again

January 23, 2008

Believe what he said!

Somewhere in the initial few pages, the author give his readers a few options before reading (or buying for that matter) this book. One of them was to trust his advice, agree that Spring+Hibernate+Eclipse are cool technologies and scrap the idea of this book.

I continued reading but now I recommend accepting his idea and save some bucks or buy something more useful, maybe separate books on Spring and Hibernate (btw, Spring in Action 2nd Edition is now available). All of these are surely good technologies but the book never goes into detail of any one of them (and it was not supposed to) and for installation/setup refers you to "latest installation instructions".

Without the depth of details on any particular technology, and lack of instructions on making you up and running makes this book feasible only for a small window of people who want to try out and be "convinced" themselves personally before eventually buying separate books on each technology.

I did not comment on the content because content comes after the 'purpose' of the book. For me its a two-star book and does not even require a content review (read other reviews for content if you really want to buy this).
October 05, 2007

Nice idea...but simplistic and patchy

I like the concept of this book. Combining a whole bunch of ideas that these days are well proven and likely to result in well written software and productivity gains.

Agile, Java, Eclipse, Hibernate, Spring. All stuff that I am working with right now. Seems the perfect book to fill in the gaps in my current knowledge.

Unfortunately, though the author may be a fine developer, he is not a great writer. This book to me had serious flaws, and unfortunately, I learnt oh so little.

The book barely scratches the surface, glossing over any real detail and bringing not much more than what you'd get reading the home page of the respective products.

Some may like the ultra-casual writing style, but I found all his diversions and personal asides distracting. Granted, it's easy to read when the writing resembles that of a spoken conversation. But I found the book to be disorganised, fragmented, and having a rushed quality to it. And just too lacking in depth.

I realise that the author was attempting to cover a lot of ground (as he points out more than once) but this book could have been so much more concise. For example, he wastes his (and my) time reviewing alternative IDEs when already admitting he is totally smitten with Eclipse. If the author just hadn't been so keen on personal asides and spent a bit more time getting the structure of the book right, he could have covered the subject matter in much more detail.

OK, so this book might be good if you want a crash-course in all those fantastic open source products. It might save you some time in getting your basic application up and running, if you've never used any of these products before. But if you're already familiar with them, or don't mind reading some online documentation, or don't mind having a quick play yourself, then your hard earned cash may be more wisely spent elsewhere.
August 01, 2007

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