In this chapter you've built on the base knowledge picked up in the previous chapter to learn about a number of more advanced capabilities of and usage strategies for the Spring container. You should now know how to configure, initialize, and manage the container, as well as handle testing concerns as you put core Spring bean factory and application context functionality to use in your own applications.
You are now ready to learn how other layers in Spring build upon and rely upon the base container capabilities to provide a large number of value-added functionality. In the next chapter, you'll learn about Spring's powerful Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) capabilities. AOP is a natural complement to Inversion of Control. You'll see how the AOP portion of the framework can be used to handle additional crosscutting concerns, which normal programming styles have difficulty handling in a non- redundant, decoupled fashion.