How to Use This Book

As with all books in the Developer's Notebook series, we're not going to pretend to give you a definitive reference. Instead, we hope to get you going quickly. You'll do so by getting your hands dirty. You'll work through one example after another. In the end, we hope you'll find the energy and promise of the Spring framework. Before you go too far, let me point you to the chapters that might be most interesting to you.

You can get the examples for this book, both in completed form and for each chapter and lab individually. Since Spring's such a wide-ranging project, you may want to skip a chapter here or there. I'm not going to restate the table of contents. In fact, most developer notebook readers probably skip the preface until the third or fourth reading anyway. Still, I should give you a couple of pointers that could save you some time.

• If you're interested in the basics of dependency injection, you'll want to pay close attention to Chapter 1.

• If you like to build user interfaces, you'll like Chapters Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and Chapter 9. If you're interested in Spring's proprietary way of doing things, check out Chapters Chapter 2 (WebMVC) and Chapter 9 (the Spring Rich sandbox project). Chapter 3 is dedicated to JSF and Struts.

• If you're into persistence, you'll like Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. Chapter 4 deals with JDBC, and Chapter 5 dives into true ORM solutions. Many people adopt Spring because it makes persistence so much easier.

• If you're hazy on AOP and how Spring's version works, you'll like Chapter 6, but if you don't plan to build your own services, you could easily skip it.

In short, look to this book for examples. Unlike examples in pure code form, these will talk to you. As I've read through examples, I've often wondered why some decisions were made. With this developer notebook, you'll have a running commentary. We hope you enjoy it.