Comprehensive Review of 'Spring Boot 3.0 Cookbook' by Erica Ayala

We are pleased to share a comprehensive review of the "​Spring Boot 3.0 Cookbook", published by Packt, and written by the reviewer Erica Ayala. This review offers an in-depth exploration of the book's key themes and insights, providing readers with a thorough understanding of its value.

Please find the review below:

I actually found this book before it was even released. I was searching for books on Java and Spring when I came across "Spring Boot 3.0 Cookbook", which wouldn't be released for a couple more months. 😩 I was so excited to get my hands on it that I literally set a reminder in my phone to order it the day it was released on Amazon. 😅

When it finally arrived, I jumped right into reading about automated testing, mocking services, and implementing security protocols like OAuth2. (Not my favorite topics, to be honest, but they're my weakest areas and I'm trying to get better at them so 🤷🏽‍♀️, here we are. 😮‍💨😅)

The book emphasizes the importance of automated testing over manual testing due to its scalability and efficiency. It covers the basics of unit and integration testing using Spring Boot's built-in testing starter. For the longest time, I didn't know the difference between the different types of testing (they're all just testing to me 🤷🏽‍♀️🥴), so this part was pretty helpful. 😅

It also covers how to mock remote dependencies using Wiremock. The book explains how to configure Wiremock and integrate it with Spring Boot for testing, which I found pretty helpful because even though I've definitely created mocks for testing before, I used MockMVC to do it, so Wiremock was completely new to me. 🤯

The security section is really detailed and covers setting up an Authorization Server, protecting APIs with OAuth2, and configuring different scopes and client authentication methods. It explains handling various OAuth2 flows, such as client credentials and authorization code grant flows.

I found this part helpful since I'm still pretty new to OAuth2 and have mostly used JWT up until now. 😕 (Speaking of which, it also explains how to use JWT tokens for secure communication and validation. 😉)

The book also mentions integration with social providers like GitHub and Facebook and even walks you through integrating Google Account login into your Spring Boot applications. Now this is the part I was excited about!! 🤩😁 By configuring your Authorization Server as an OAuth2 client with Google as the Identity Provider (IdP), you can enable users to log in with their Gmail accounts.

It also explains how to configure the security chain using Spring Security's 'SecurityConfig' class, detailing the setup of 'Security FilterChain' beans to handle various security checks and the login process. This part was definitely helpful for me because 'Security FilterChain' was one of the things that my bootcamp just completely glossed over. 😕 It was kinda like "Paste these snippets of code into such-and-such class to implement security", and that was it. 🫤🤷🏽‍♀️

There's a chapter where the book teaches you to identify performance bottlenecks and optimize your application. Now this stuff was completely new to me. 😳 Thankfully, it guides you through the entire process, from identifying issues to applying solutions like caching and runtime tuning.

It clearly explains the impact caching has on overall performance. By reducing the load on the database through caching, the application can handle more requests efficiently, demonstrating the real-world benefits of proper caching strategies.

The book also talks about monitoring and application health and covers metrics like CPU usage, heap memory, etc. explaining the importance of diagnosing and fixing performance issues.

Overall, I think this book is a great resource for Java developers and it's packed with clear explanations and detailed examples to help you develop secure RESTful APIs with Spring Boot. 😊 I literally waited months for this book to be released and I can honestly say that it exceeded my expectations!! 😁