Spring Data by Michael Hunger, Jonathan L. Brisbin, Oliver Gierke, Mark Pollack, and Thomas Risberg is an excellent book to learn about how to use the Spring Data framework and be able to apply it to the project that you are working on. I am a big fan of the Spring framework and each time I get exposed to a new component of the framework like Spring Data I get more excited about the work that is being done there. This book is a must read for anyone developing software applications that needs to interact with a data source. Applying the techniques that are explained in this book will simplify the integration that it takes to work with different data sources. Throughout the book the authors explain how to use Spring Data framework to interact with different data sources like JDBC, Hibernate, Neo4j, and MongoDB to mention of few of the data source types.
One of the sections in this book the I liked the most was the ones dealing with using Spring Data with Apache Hadoop. The latest challenges that we have today is dealing with large amounts of data and typically people look at the Apache Hadoop framework. The Authors do a great job showing how to use Spring to analyze data with Hadoop and create a Big data pipeline using Spring Batch and Spring Integration.
I would recommend this book to anyone that enjoys working with the Spring framework and to anyone looking to start learning about the capabilities that the Spring framework, especially Spring Data, can help with the development of your applications.
David Witherspoon 