Monday, November 26, 2012

Book Review: Spring Data

I'm currently reviewing the book Spring Data from Packt Publishing. You can find the book at http://www.packtpub.com/spring-data/book.

Overview
This book is about Spring Data JPA and Spring Data Redis

  • Implement JPA repositories with lesser code
  • Includes functional sample projects that demonstrate the described concepts in action and help you start experimenting right away
  • Provides step-by-step instructions and a lot of code examples that are easy to follow and help you to get started from page one


Full review
My initial impression of this book is that it's too short and lacks full coverage because it only focuses on Spring Data JPA and Spring Data Redis. We all know how big the Spring Data umbrella projects are. But it turns out this is the strength of the book. By focusing on a subset of Spring Data umbrella projects, it's able to focus better on what matters most.

As I read the book, I slowly realized that this book is a gem. If you need a solid understanding of Spring Data JPA, read this book. It tells you step-by-step all the possible query technologies, usage patterns, and their pros and cons. The book gradually prepares the reader to the value of Spring Data.

The Spring Data JPA coverage is quite extensive. It teaches you how to download and install the necessary libraries. Configuration is based on programmatic configuration instead of the usual XML configuration files. I think this is good but also bad. It would be great if the book offers sample configuration both in XML and Java-based config. Since most users are familiar with XML configuration, translating from Java-based config would require extra effort to comprehend for most Spring users. Anyway, that's a minor weakness that we can live-up with.

The book is successful in demonstrating how to provide CRUD support through Spring Data JPA and how to implement your own custom repository. There are various way to perform queries in Spring Data JPA, and I think the book has managed to cover all of them, including QueryDSL.

The book's coverage on Spring Data Redis is extensive. It covers installation and configuration, connector types, Redis data structures, and of course, Spring Data support for Redis. The book teaches how to save relational data and perform CRUD operations in a NoSQL manner. It also covers messaging and caching support with Redis. Overall it's a pleasant read. It's interesting how the book has smoothly transitioned from Spring Data JPA to Redis.

Overall, Spring Data from Packt Publishing is a solid book that I recommend to everyone to read.
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