In a nutshell, AOP is a mathematician's way of explaining how you should organize your code neatly to avoid having a particular functionality scattered in bits and pieces across lots of modules or object. At its heart, AOP is a good thing whether or not it is called AOP.
But you are faced with a specific AOP implementation and need to figure out how to use it. I think the best way to do this is to look for blogs where people post recipes and examples of how they are using it with Spring. This way you bypass the mathemeticians and get to read the writings of engineers who are more in touch with reality.
There are two kinds of computer scientists, mathematicians who delight in the obscure and use tortured terminology to explain simple things, and engineers who will tell you step by step how to build software. Working programmers tend to be more of the engineer mindset because abstract thinkers find it hard to handle the long slog of gaining experience. That's why you find AOP hard to understand. Not because it is hard to understand, but because it is explained so poorly by abstract mathematical thinkers who are not terribly familiar with "plain English".
I wonder what would happen if an AOP guru sat down with a Function Point Analysis guru.
