This book is impressively ambitious. To give a description of Java development is a full book on its own. To throw in a description of Hibernate, Spring and Eclipse at the same time sounds like a recipe for disaster. The book's scope is even larger than advertised (throw in XP, Junit, mock objects, Ant, HQSQLDB and a load of other things), but overall given these reservations, I was pleasantly surprised!

None of the constituent technologies are described in a huge amount of detail. There is enough there to allow one to decide whether it is worthwhile looking further (and also a list of alternatives to each component should you decide to try out other approaches for your development).

The development approach described is XP based, and shows the development of a web-based application, right the way through initial definition of the functional requirements, through design and code and automated testing. Inevitably, given the number of topics in the book each one gets a very lightweight treatment, but this does allow a good overview of how all these technologies might be used together in a real project. The author includes some personal insights and opinions interspersed throughout the main body of the text. These were generally interesting, and added another dimension to the book.

There were a few niggles. For example, why write test code which outputs println messages on error, why not assert? There was a bit too much of the 'this is the way that we do it, and the result is bound to be a massive success' for my liking, a useful chapter might have been on handling niggles and disasters that happen after the code is written.

However, on the whole I think that this book would be useful for someone who has Java coding experience (which is assumed by the author), but perhaps hasn't used one or more of the other technologies covered.