Sometime back I had posted a preview of the book: Learning Play! Framework 2. I haven’t been through the other books on Play! Framework. http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=experieunlimi-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1782160124&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=FFFFFF&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
This book adopts a pracitcal approach where its recommended to try and code as you read through the book. If you dont try the code, then you are most likely to be lost and will not be able to gather much from the book. The book covers and gives a taste of different features of Play! framework, but doesn’t really go deep into different topics. It starts explaining with View layer, controller layer and then finishing with the model layer. The book also gives some introduction to CoffeeScript. If you are not familiar with Scala, you need not worry, the book covers basic concepts on Scala.
Its a relatively small book with short chapters. I would recommend anyone picking this book to read it from end-to-end continuously. If you read some chapters and try to get back after a few days then you might want to do some catching up with the earlier content. The chapters are related, so is the code explained in them. Not all of the code is present in the book, you have to download the source code of the book and work along with it.
The one thing which I did not like about the book is that they have used screenshots of the code which makes the code a bit difficult to read. At times there are two sets of code compared against each other which makes it even more difficult. I was using the eBook so I could zoom into the code and overcome this issue. The other thing you have to be careful about is that the examples used in the book are for Play 2.0 and if you are using Play 2.1 there subtle differences in the API. The source code which comes with the book does provide the source for both Play 2.0 and Play 2.1 and this should help the reader in obtaining the code for Play 2.1.
I would recommend this book as it is focussed and adopts a practical approach without getting too much into the details of behind the framework.