Back in June I went through the pain of trying to make my way through Spring: A Developer’s Notebook. It turns out that Bruce Tate himself admitted that the book was badly done in his Amazon one star review:
My appologies to all readers, and O’Reilly customers. I let you down. There’s no other way to put it. This book’s quality sucked.
Makes me feel justified in my frustrations. It does bring up huge issues about O’Reilly’s editing standards. If most the examples don’t actually work how did this ever get published?