Spring learning path

(Latest revision: 2025-05-23)

I sometimes get the odd e-mail with a general “I’ve learned the basics of Spring Boot, how do I learn more?”

Here are a few recommendations on your Spring learning path.

Getting started

For the basics, the Guides section on the official website is a good starting point. You do have to use the search bar field to find specific topics, but the most common scenarios are covered.

A more structured learning path is available on Spring Academy. There is a list of courses, each focused on achieving a specific goal, for example “secure a REST API using OAuth2”. Some of these courses have videos content and some are just text. Most have interactive labs where you can test your knowledge of the previous lessons. On the platform, you’ll find courses that cover basics of Boot, Security with OAuth2, Batch and Cloud Stream. It is free, but you do need to register.

Going further

If you’re into the video format, Spring developer advocates produce up-to-date, good quality content on a weekly basis. Check out Dan Vega and Josh Long. The content they produce is a mix of new things the Spring team is working on, and established technologies that the community wants to hear about. Siva is also a very prolific developer advocate, who regularly touches Spring.

Going back to Spring Academy, Sergi Almar, the famous organizer of the Spring I/O conference, has a course on Spring Framework fundamentals.

There are great books on Spring-related topics. I can personally recommend two: Spring In Action by Craig Walls (it is a bit dated, but should get a new edition some time soon), Spring Security In Action by Laurentiu Spilca.

And of course, the reference docs for all the various Spring projects. They are a trove of information, but you may need to read some things over two or three times until you grasp the more complicated concepts. For example, here’s an “architecture” page in the Spring Security docs, the intro to the Spring Test Context framework, or details about how Spring Boot’s externalized configuration gets picked up.

I personally recommend the Youtube channel of the Spring I/O conference. Go the videos tab, click “popular”, and voilà! Hours of content by experts for intermediate-level developers.

And lastly, my friend Thomas already has a list, called awesome-spring! It has not been updated in a little while but it still has very relevant content.