“Learning #SpringBoot” enters finishing stage with @PacktPub

By Greg Turnquist

Greg is a member of the Spring team, an author of several books on Spring Boot, conference speaker, and the lead for Spring Data JPA.

September 20, 2014

packt-logoGreetings readers,

Having just sent off the last rewrites, my book has entered the finishing stage. This is the point where my publisher begins to turn the crank on converting my LibreOffice manuscript into a printable tome. They also sell e-copies and even have a subscription library model. You can pay a flat rate and essentially access any book they have, including mine when it becomes available. My goal is to post a link the moment I see at available for ordering.

So what’s in this book?

For those that haven’t kept up, here is a quick listing of the chapter titles for Learning Spring Boot:

  • Chapter 1, Quick Start with Groovy
  • Chapter 2, Quick Start with Java
  • Chapter 3, Debugging and Managing Your App
  • Chapter 4, Accessing Data with Spring Boot
  • Chapter 5, Securing Your App with Spring Boot

First of all, this book is in NO WAY comprehensive. To cover everything Spring Boot does would require multiple titles. People that construe Spring Boot as being the solution to über JARs or just embedded servlet containers are missing the point. Spring Boot is an entirely new approach to app development that polishes up rough edges of Java that have been around for years. In the paraphrased words of Andrew Glover at this year’s SpringOne keynote, “Spring Boot has made Java fun again!”

This book attacks several of these key areas from the context of helping everyday developers do their job. When you sit down to build an app, you want to start writing functional code on Day One, not get buried in architectural layers and UML diagrams, right?

Spring Boot is designed from the ground up to write solid apps using Spring that you can carry all the way to the server room. And it comes packed with production-grade services you’ll need to maintain it over the life of the project.

platform-spring-bootWhy can’t I just read the reference docs?

A good question that authors must always be ready to answer when pitching their idea or trying to sell copies later on is this: “Why would I buy your book?”

I won’t lie to you. Spring Boot’s reference doc is quite stunning. I have seen many ref docs, and have always found Spring docs to historically have some of the most in depth material I can find. MANY open source projects come in light on this front. However, it’s become tricky to have lots of depth without getting lost. Spring Boot’s ref docs actually do a fantastic job of diving in, and yet still giving you paths to other areas you might need.

Even then, when its time to sit down and start producing apps, you want examples and demos and a handful “this is the best way to get started.” I have extracted material from the reference docs, but tried to link together a chain of useful concepts that can get you in motion the first week you start a new project. These concepts aren’t always arranged in the reference docs in the same order you might be using them to crank out your e-commerce site. (If they were, it would be a tutorial, right?)

This book is also filled with tips. Small sections all over the place that try to answer the question, “Why did you do that right there?” No decision is ever 100% right. Things depend on the context, so I fee it’s important to supply a context for why you may choose one path or another.

Ideally, you should be able to read this book cover-to-cover, and then when you visit the reference docs, use them with even greater effectiveness.

Are there other books out there?

Right now, no. Nothing. Nada. Zip. You can’t find another book on Spring Boot. My publisher and I worked hard to get this one to market as fast as possible. Why? Because Spring Boot is hot! The session at least year’s SpringOne conference was packed to the hilt. At this year’s SpringOne (a week ago) almost every talk wove in detail about Spring Boot even including Grails plan to rewrite itself on top of Boot with their 3.0 release.

People are hungry for this, so we hammered out an outline that would cover the arguably most popular topics people are clamoring to read about.

I have other colleagues and friends in the software industry that have been talking about book deals. One reached out to me to write a proposal, but I had to politely decline because they asked me the week after I had signed my contract.

Are other books coming? For sure. I’m sure many publishers are working up deals, consulting existing authors, or ears open for new proposals on the topic. But no one is going to have anything available next month.

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