The Java Spring Framework has been growing; this fourth edition updates the essential Spring features.

The book is divided into 17 chapters, presented in a logical order. First, the authors show readers how to set up the development environment. In the next two chapters, the authors introduce Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs) and the Spring model-view controller (MVC) framework. In chapter 4, the authors talk about RESTful web services, while chapter 5 is about Spring MVC asynchronous processing. The next chapters focus on social networks, security, mobile applications, working with databases, and transaction management. Chapter 11 introduces the Spring Batch Framework. Later chapters cover NoSQL, enterprise services and remoting technologies, messaging, the integration framework, and testing. The last chapter covers the Grails security plug-in.

The contents in the book are presented clearly. It uses the form “Problem-Solution-How It Works” to cover every basic aspect of the Spring Framework. The book has a website that provides examples and source code for the book. It is a book for Java programmers to quickly look up the programming problems that they want to resolve. The strength of this book, as stated in the back of the book, is that “when you start a new project, you’ll be able to copy the code and configuration files from this book, and then modify them for your needs. This can save you a great deal of work over creating a project from scratch.” Personally, I think the coverage of Spring features in this book is extensive, but the source code needs some work. For example, in Section 3-1, the first example of MVC: Besides adding the dependency of spring-webmvc in Maven, I had to add javaee-web-api to the dependency as well. Also, the deploy uniform resource locator (URL) is http://localhost:8080/welcome in the source code, instead of the URL http://localhost:8080/court/welcome, shown in the book. Readers can figure it out by searching for it, but I think might be a headache for a newbie. Overall, I think this is a helpful book for readers who have some idea about Spring Framework concepts.