What you will learn from this how to find the simplest and most maintainable architecture for your application; effective transaction management without EJB; how to solve common problems in enterprise software development using AOP and inversion of Control; Web tier design and the place of the web tier in a well-designed J2EE application; effective data access techniques for J2EE applications with JDBC, Hibernate, and JDO; how to leverage open source products to improve productivity and reduce custom coding; and how to design for optimal performance and scalability.
The book was not only motivating to write better code but it actaully showed how to do that on nice examples. I have learnt several new techniques and realized what I was doing wrong.
I started liking J2EE Development after reading this book. Worked with Spring Framework ver 1 and 2 for a few projects. This book gives a very good introduction to concepts behind the framework.
Knowledge of the Spring framework is essential. This book is not. Long on didactic posturing and short on information. Other Spring books are much better.