I have been interested in AOP stuff ever since the first time the acronym has been pronounced. Since then, I'm trying to get my eyes and brain cells on each and every AOP article and book on the subject. Two years ago, I asked O'Reilly whether they would be interested in a book about AspectJ and/or AOP. Mike and Brett were quite interested but at some point the whole thing just went down the sink. What really matters to me is that they finally got someone (Russell Miles) to write their "AspectJ Cookbook" which I have been delighted to review. Thanks O'Reilly for contributing this title to my AOP bookshelf.

My 8-horseshoes review follows (also available at Javaranch.com):

Undeniably, the aspect-oriented paradigm has gained a significant momentum in the academic world over the past years and is increasingly acquiring ground and broad support in industrial settings as well. Until now we have experienced four editions of the famous AOSD conference, the publication of a dozen books fully dedicated to aspect-oriented matters as well as the birth of numerous frameworks, libraries and languages, such as AspectJ which is commonly considered as the most popular and mature AOP language. The increasing popularity of AspectJ is thus directly proportional to the growing need for a consolidated AOP code base that shall help people solve their everyday programming tasks.

In AspectJ Cookbook, Russell Miles has successfully put together more than 350 pages of high quality material freshly unloaded from his AOP backpack just for you. Sure as hell you already have a dozen versions of the logging aspect in your pockets, but do you know how to efficiently validate method parameters, how to transparently remote a class using RMI, how to implement GoF patterns in a non invasive way, and how to seamlessly enable caching in your code? I thought so.

Aside from the fact that this book could have contained twice its actual page count, it is a pure product of a pragmatist for pragmatists. You won’t find endless and tiring stories, just a fair load of ready to use AOP code organized along O’Reilly’s famous problem/solution/discussion cookbook format. If you are still wondering whether AOP will take off some day, well, stop thinking and start acting!