Yesterday there were a few posts related to the forthcoming Beginning Spring 2 book, and I wanted to point those out here.

First, since this book will be of interest to those new to Spring - or even those who are simply curious at this point, we decided that it would be a good idea to include some discussion of common misconceptions about Spring. These have been posted here:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2006/08/ten_common_misconceptions_abou.html
and on the Apress blog: http://ablog.apress.com/?p=1221.

Second, Interface21's Steven Devijver, the book's tireless lead author, has posted a great overview:
http://blog.interface21.com/main/2006/08/03/finishing-beginning-spring-2-from-novice-to-professional/.

The book, Beginning Spring 2: from Novice to Professional, will be in stores this October. While it aims to provide a gentle introduction appropriate for new Spring users, it will also be very useful for "filling in the gaps" even if you have been using the Spring Framework for a while. In other words, the book covers a lot of ground: the Spring container, AOP, data acess, MVC, and more. The coverage includes many new Spring 2.0 features - most notably an entire chapter exploring Spring's new and improved approach to AOP such as the XSD-based AOP namespace, integration with the AspectJ pointcut expression language, and @AspectJ integration! (Don't worry Spring 2 is backwards compatible - and the migration path is easy too). Throughout, the book provides a pragmatic balance of theory and examples. Those examples are backed by an interesting sample application (not overly simplistic). I personally was delighted when Steven asked me to contribute some exercises - yet another of his great ideas for providing an excellent resource to beginners. The first set of exercises walk through several techniques of dependency injection from basic wiring to the use of FactoryBeans and externalizing properties files. The second set of exercises are focused on AOP - including the new namespace and the @AspectJ style.

We are looking forward to an active companion site after the book's release, and of course you can continue to find many great discussions and examples of Spring 2.0 features here at the Interface21 team blog.