Play Framework Cookbook Review

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Play Framework Cookbook ReviewThe new book, Play Framework Cookbook by Alexander Reelsen ([...]) has a lot of promise and provides great information, but suffers from hard-to-read English and typos peppered throughout the sample source code. The book's intent is to provide established Play framework developers a technical walk-through of how to take advantage of the unique features of the framework. While the book achieves it's goal, it could have been an amazing book with a little more editing. I highly recommend reading the free sample chapter, "Understanding Controllers" from the Packt Publishing website at [...]
The Play Framework Cookbook offers each topic as a recipe. This makes using the book as a reference very easy. It offers seven chapters ranging from the basics of the framework all the way through running the application in production. Each chapter has between five and ten recipes. Two of the chapters focus on writing modules for the Play framework, including a recipe on implementing your own persistence layer. Each recipe gives a high-level overview of why you would want to use it, some, but not all of the source code required to implement the recipe, and lastly, a walk-through of the pertinent code. I found most of the recipes very interesting and well thought-out. The multiple recipes on byte-code enhancement and JSON/XML binding were spot-on and quite helpful. Once I got into the flow of the book, I thoroughly enjoyed the content presented.
While the technical information in each recipe was interesting and relevant, I had a hard time reading the recipes. Not because of the technical nature of the content, but because this book probably wasn't written by a native English speaker. For example, on page 8, when writing about the directory structure of a Play application, Alexander writes "Its controllers contain the business logic and its views, being a mix of HTML and the Play template language." While I understood what the author was trying to say, it made the book hard to read as I had to re-read large chunks of text because of grammatical errors.
The other major problem with the book was the amount of typos in the source code. After some analysis, it appears spaces are missing in key places. For example, on page 45, a method is declared with a signature of:
private String getTime(Response response, intpos) {
instead of
private String getTime(Response response, int pos) {
The missing space between int and pos, can be frustrating, because this same typo happens all-throughout the book. After reading a few recipes, the typos become noise, but it still detracts from what could have been a fantastic book. For reference, I did not find these typos in the source code that I downloaded from the Packt Publishing website. Additionally, the source code recipes I downloaded, compiled and worked as expected.
Lastly, a few minor quirks with the Play Framework Cookbook. A couple of the recipes, I felt, were largely pulled from the Play framework documentation, in particular the recipe on the security module. While not bad to include these recipes, reading them I felt like Alexander could have differentiated his content by providing some of his great insight that was prevalent throughout the rest of the book. Also, I randomly clicked on a few of the links in the PDF, while some of the links took me exactly where they were intended to go, most of the Play framework links took me to a general Play framework page. This is because the version of the Play framework this book's links reference is 1.2 and the current version of the Play framework is 1.2.2. One of the links, on page 235, to an article from Erik Bakker, took me to two different web pages depending on where I clicked it. The front half part of the URL took me to [...]- which brought up a 404 error. The second half took me to the arabs.com home page. Cutting-and-pasting this link into a browser also returned a 404 error. A quick google search did bring up the article specified. Another minor quirk, while reading it on my iPad, there was a large amount of white space around every page. While this is great for a printed book where you are physically touching and folding pages and dealing with a binder, as an eBook it just makes the font smaller and the page harder to read. That being said, these quirks wouldn't prevent me from buying the book.
In summary, I've already used a few of the recipes specified in the Play Framework Cookbook in my applications. They work great and are a huge time saver. While it's unfortunate that the English is hard to read, the book offers great technical content. This will ensure it stays at the top of my bookshelf.Play Framework Cookbook Overview

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