To my delight, APress sent me a complimentary copy of Rob Harrop's and Jan Machacek's latest masterpiece: "Pro Spring". Without any further comment, I'll let my review speak for itself.

My 10-horseshoes review follows (also available at Javaranch.com):

Unless you have been living in a cave somewhere over the past 18 months, you have most certainly heard of Spring, the next generation lightweight framework, which integrates numerous widely supported technologies into an elegant, well-designed and extensible infrastructure that finally makes J2EE accessible to any frustrated expert and novice developer.

Aside from its impressive set of technical features, another invaluable asset of Spring is incontestably its extensive documentation and examples suite. However, it is worth noting that this book is not a blatant clone of the provided documentation. Instead, it takes a different route in that the authors gracefully introduce Spring by adopting a very pragmatic approach based on their real-world experiences with the framework. What you will read in this book is not theory at all. You better fasten your seatbelts and get ready to see Spring at work in all its splendor. The authors spend over 700 pages showing you how to use the framework in practice when dealing with topics, such as inversion of control, data access (JDBC, Hibernate and iBATIS), AOP, transaction management, EJB, JNDI, JMS, e-mail, Struts, MVC, and many more. Once you’ll get through this book, you’ll most certainly confess that Spring truly is an impressive framework and you’ll even ask yourself how you could manage to develop your applications without it.

Finally, note that in order to get the most out of this book, you should be comfortable with both J2EE concepts and the Java platform in general as the authors deliberately stay focused on Spring and its more than welcome load of novelties. Definitely a must have for people willing to start developing seriously!!