My team is about to build a new product and we are using Spring and Spring MVC. There are other book posts on stackoverflow, but I couldn't find one that matched my needs.
My manager will be purchasing books for our team to use as a resource so...
What are the best books about Spring?
(Please list each book suggestion in a separate answer)
(If you already see your suggestion, just vote for it!)
"Manning Spring in Action 2nd Edition"
Covers a wide range on the Spring framework. Lots of good insight.
You can't go wrong with Spring in Action. It includes two chapters on Spring MVC.
I'm also trying to learn Spring, specifically the Bean container, but I'm not lucky enough to have a boss to buy books for me :)
browsing around the web today, I found this: http://static.springframework.org/spring/docs/2.0.x/reference/index.html
This seems to be the official spring documentation, which I must say is extremely detailed and useful. It goes into broad details about almost all of the parts of Spring (the Bean container anyway) and should be a good substitute for a book until you find one
In sharp contrast to most open source projects, the Spring reference document is actually very comprehensive, has a lot of examples, and is well written. While a book will probably do a bit more 'hand holding', it may not cover recent features as well as the reference docs. The latest version of the Spring docs is available here.
The Apress books are the most up to date and cover Spring and Spring-MVC. Specifically, Spring Recipes and Pro Spring 2.5. That being said, the Spring documentation is the most concise source for answers and is usually the first place I look.
I think Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow is a fantastic book. I read it about 2 years ago as a Struts developer who knew how to use Spring with Hibernate and in a Service layer but knew nothing about Spring MVC.
After I finished I had learned a hell of a lot. And not just what I paid for. A lot of nice little tricks about Java, the Spring Framework, and just development in general (for instance, this book introduced me to the idea of an anemic domain model and why I wanted to avoid having one), all stuff I learned about from reading this book.
reference for Spring 3.0 http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/spring-framework-reference/html/