Book Review: Spring Persistence: A Running Start

Book Review: Spring Persistence: A Running Start
Author: Paul Tepper Fisher and Solomon Duskis
Publisher: Apress Inc
ISBN: 978-1-4302-1878-4

Persistence is a necessary evil in creating applications that enable user interaction. Using Spring makes dealing with persistence much easier but there is the configurations that get everything starting which confuses some new to the framework. The book Spring Persistence: A Running Start is a quick overview on how to get the most common persistence types setup and running with a minimal effort. I liked the breakout by chapter for each persistence style. The book covers the basics of why to separate your application into layers to break the dependencies, JDBC, Hibernate and JPA, IBatis then some transaction and testing. Lastly it covers a little of Groovy and Grails. This book which is aptly named gives a person with little or no experience integrating persistence into a Spring application a Running Start with good examples of configurations to get the basics going. From there the user needs to work on their own, or consult with a more advanced reference or find the information on the web. I would have liked to see a more in depth coverage about the various types of persistence technologies and more advanced examples. Not all the time do we get to deal with easy database scenarios as in the provided examples. Many times we need to work with legacy databases that were not built with ORM friendly tables. This book does what it comes to do but I feel that there is an audience for more advanced but just as focused books on the Spring layers. I come away from reading this book with a since of knowing more about some of the persistence types that I have not dealt with yet but I feel that I want more. I recommend this book for anyone new to Spring or someone that needs to start using another ORM type like Hibernate or IBatis.