My better half bought me a copy of Spring in Action (2nd Edition) by Craig Walls last year. I think it’s been a great help for me as I’ve been getting started with Spring.
I’d say the first four chapters are worth reading in sequence to get a feel for what Spring does and how it does it.
Chapter 1 introduces what Spring does, with some really nice examples of how using the dependency injection capabilities allows components to be mocked up and unit tested much more easily. I think writing good unit tests can be challenging (well, it is for me anyway) so it’s nice to see this theme taking a prominent role.
Chapters 2 and 3 start onto a description of Spring’s dependency injection capabilities, from declaring beans and references to craziness like declaratively substituting method implementations in a class.
Chapter 4 moves on to Spring support for aspect-oriented programming, a technique with which behaviours of an application that really don’t belong in an object’s code (think security, auditing, etc.) can be defined outside of your business logic. There’s a nice theme of examples running through these chapters that somehow does make this stuff make intuitive sense.
From here on in things get a bit more esoteric. Other topics I found interesting were database access (covering JDBC, Hibernate, JPA and more), web services, EJB and JMS – but there are many more. For these later topics, you tend to get a little background and step-by-step introductions with examples. Given the range of topics there’s a often a surprising depth. The material has also proven to be quite accessible when I’ve gone back for reference.
There aren’t really any downsides. Where I’d like the material to go deeper there are other books I can get that are more specific. The occasional humour can be irritating if I’m in the wrong mood but hey, it’s in moderation.
If you’re looking for a good general introduction to what Spring is and what it can do for you, can recommend this book.
crossedstreams.com 
Thanks for the kind review!