Diving into Spring and its ecosystem can be overwhelming. Spring Boot, Spring Framework, Spring MVC, what do these all mean?

And while Spring is unusually well-documented, learning from the docs isn’t for everyone.

Thus, in this guide, I’ve curated a list of the best free and paid resources to learn Spring and its various projects. Recognizing that half of Java developers prefer reading or watching, I’ve included resources that cater to both learning styles. Whether you’re new to Spring, looking to fill knowledge gaps, or eager to dive deeper into Spring’s Spring Data, Security, Cloud, or more, you’re sure to find a course that meets your needs.

Rest assured that the vast majority of the courses featured in this guide use the latest major versions of Spring (6.0) and Spring Boot (3.0), so don’t worry about learning anything outdated.

Click on the shortcuts for more details:

• Top Picks
• Why Learn Spring
• Courses Overview
• What Next?
• Why You Should Trust Us
• BCG Methodology

Here are my top picks. Click on one to skip to the course details:

Why Learn Spring?

Spring is a widely-used open-source application framework for the Java platform. It provides a comprehensive programming and configuration model for modern Java-based enterprise applications.

If you’re considering a career as a Java developer, knowledge of Spring Boot or the Spring ecosystem is often a must-have skill — a quick search of job postings for Java developers on Indeed or LinkedIn will reveal that.

This is because Spring has become the de facto standard for building enterprise-grade Java applications: Java is the 5th most popular language for server-side programming according to W3Tech. And according to the StackOverflow 2023 Developer survey, Spring Boot is the third most popular web application framework, after filtering out unrelated web technologies.

Thus by mastering Spring, you’ll not only enhance your skill set but also increase your marketability in the competitive job market.

Courses Overview

• 3 of my picks are free while the rest are paid
• Half are books while the other half are video-based
• 2 of the courses include interactive exercises.

Best Free Learning Platform (Spring Academy)

The first courses I’d recommend to beginners are the official ones by developers behind Spring themselves, hosted on Spring Academy. Originally, you needed a subscription to access all the good courses. Lucky for us, they’ve recently made them completely free to anyone who signs up with their work email!

But why choose Spring Academy apart from that it’s official? Well, a few reasons:

• Zero to Hero:
  • Comprehensive yet practical, you’ll go from knowing nothing about Spring to developing your own web apps and building cloud-ready microservices
  • Topics covered include: Rest APIs, Spring Boot, Spring Framework, Spring Data, Spring Security, Spring Testing, Hibernate
• Up-to-Date:

• • Everything on the platform is updated for the latest versions of Spring 6 and Spring Boot 3
• Interactive Labs:
  • The video and text lessons are accompanied by interactive in-browsing labs, equipped with a terminal, code editor, and VM. You’ll have plenty of opportunities for hands-on practice. Also, the labs come with video demos to refer to if you get stuck
• Taught by Professionals:
  • You’ll pick up best practices from the engineers of Spring itself, as well as experienced developers with over a decade of experience with the framework. Notable names include: Craig Walls, Dan Vega, Mahmoud Ben Hassine, Marco Behler, and Sergi Almar
• Exam-ready:
  • Upon finishing the learning path, you’ll be ready for the Spring Certified Professional exam. As Spring is a massively popular hireable skill, this certification will help you stand out from the crowd, proving to employers that you’re capable of springing into action with enterprise applications.

You should take the Spring Certified Professional learning path as it covers the majority of the areas you need to work with Spring and Spring Boot. Other notable courses include Building a Batch Application with Spring Batch and Building Native Applications with Spring Boot and GraalVM.

So if you only had to choose one course from my list, start with this one.

Institution	Spring Academy
Provider	Independent
Prerequisites	A working knowledge of the Java language and Java ecosystem
Workload	26 hours (learning path)
Cost	Free with work email
Certificate	Paid

Best Paid Comprehensive Course (Chad Darby)

Another great up-to-date Spring 6 course is Chad Darby’s paid Udemy course: Spring Boot 3, Spring 6 & Hibernate for Beginners. It covers essentially the same core topics as Spring Academy’s: Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Security, Spring Testing, etc.

Chad Darby has a high reputation as an instructor in the Spring community. You’ll find many praises of his courses on Reddit and the course itself has an average rating of 4.6 stars from over 81,000 learners.

But why pay for this course if Spring Academy is free? For starters:

• More beginner-friendly:
  • Spring Academy’s approach is fast-paced, focusing more on practice than theory. Chad assumes less from you, and also covers back-end concepts not necessarily related to Spring such as MySQL
• More in-depth Spring MVC:
  • Chad delves deeper into Spring MVC. For example, he covers Thymeleaf, a server-side Java templating engine, as well as Spring MVC form data binding and validation, while Spring Academy doesn’t
• More code-alongs:
  • Spring Academy’s emphasis is on quickly teaching you the theory, and then you apply it in the labs by yourself. If you prefer learning from example, Chad has plenty of code demos with step-by-step explanations
• Q&A section:
  • Spring Academy lacks a dedicated student Q&A forum. Udemy has their own forum, and Chad is pretty active in it.

Chad also has courses on full-stack web development with Spring Boot, including one using Angular and another with React.

Provider	Udemy
Instructor	Chad Darby
Prerequisites	Basic Java and HTML experience
Workload	33–34 hours
Enrollments	370K
Rating	4.6/5.0 (81K)
Cost	Paid
Certificate	Paid

Best Paid Deep-Dive Course (Marco Behler)

If you have the cash to invest into your professional development, the best paid course I’ve found is Marco Behler’s The Confident Spring Professional.

In case you don’t know who he is, Marco is a Developer Advocate at JetBrains who runs the education-focused YouTube channel MarcoCodes. He’s known for his in-depth articles investigating Spring fundamentals, and this course is a reflection of his expertise.

Mixing both text and video tutorials, it’s suitable for both beginners to Spring and those who’ve worked with it for a while:

• Beginners: Familiar with OOP? It’ll get you from zero knowledge of Spring to having a deep grasp of the Spring ecosystem, including Spring WebMVC, Spring & Databases, and Spring Boot
• Experienced: Do you get the job done with Spring Boot without really understanding why? This will strengthen your fundamentals to make you truly confident that you understand what you write.

As an example of how hands-on this course is, you’ll start this course not with Spring Boot, but plain Java. Why? By building a minimalistic web app with plain, modern Java and HttpServlets, you’ll gain intrinsic familiarity with how Spring works under-the-hood. You’ll be guided through interactive code examples and exercises.

Marco provides a free preview of the first module, and if you feel the price isn’t worth it after paying, you can get a refund up to 21-days after purchase.

Provider	Independent
Instructor	Marco Behler
Prerequisites	Familiarity with programming
Workload	20+ hours
Cost	Paid
Certificate	None

Best Free Full-Stack Project with Angular (Bouali Ali)

Now that you’re familiar with how Spring and Spring Boot works, it’s time to put your skills to the test by building a full-stack project: a book social network with Angular.

Bouali Ali, a software developer with over a decade of experience, guides you in this free YouTube course. You’ll implement basic but necessary features like user registration, authentication, email validation, book management, borrowing/returning books, and community interaction.

From planning to deployment, you’ll:

• Design a class diagram starting from business requirements
• Use JWT token authentication, including a registration mechanism users receive a security code via email to activate their account
• Implement the service layer, handle exceptions, and create custom exceptions for different business requirements.
• Develop a REST API with object validation using Spring and Bean Validation, and implement pagination and sorting for the book list
• Create an Angular user interface with features for searching books, displaying book details, managing user’s books, and providing feedback on books, including rating and return options
• And finally, use Docker for containerizing the application

Channel	Bouali Ali
Provider	YouTube
Instructor	Bouali Ali
Prerequisites	Basic experience with Spring and Angular
Workload	11–12 hours
Views	31K
Likes	1.6K
Cost	Free
Certificate	None

Best Free Full-Stack Project with React (Amigoscode)

Not a fan of Angular? Then perhaps this free YouTube course from Amigoscode might be up your alley: Spring Boot, React.js & AWS S3 Full Stack Development.

As the name suggests, you’ll build a complete end-to-end full-stack web application with a focus on integrating cloud-based file storage using AWS S3.

You’ll:

• Learn how to implement file storage functionality using AWS S3 in a Spring Boot application
• Integrate the Spring Boot backend with a React.js frontend to allow users to upload and view files
• Configure the necessary AWS resources, such as an S3 bucket and IAM roles, to enable the file storage functionality
• Understand how to handle larger file uploads by configuring the application’s file size limits
• Deploy the full-stack application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk using a CI/CD pipeline
• Gain experience with setting up a development environment using Docker and Docker Compose.

Don’t know React? Check out my BCG React for free courses.

Channel	Amigoscode
Provider	YouTube
Instructor	Nelson Djalo
Prerequisites	Basic experience with Spring and React
Workload	≈3 hours
Views	163K
Likes	4.5K
Cost	Free
Certificate	None

Best Paid Book for Spring Data and Hibernate (Cătălin Tudose)

Spring and Hibernate are two of the most popular and widely used frameworks in the Java ecosystem for data persistence — and Cătălin Tudose will guide you on mastering them both!

In Java Persistence with Spring Data and Hibernate, you’ll learn how to develop safe and flexible Java applications that can persist, retrieve, update and delete the information from both relational (like MySQL) and non-relational databases (like MongoDB).

Some key topics the book discusses include:

• Understanding object/relational persistence
• Configuring Spring Data to work with different databases
• Mapping entities with JPA/Hibernate annotations and JDBC
• Transaction management and performance optimization techniques
• Querying and testing Java persistence applications with QueryDSL
• Accessing non-relational databases with Spring Data MongoDB and Hibernate OGM.

You’ll cover all of these through various example applications, such as an E-commerce website.

Want to learn this for free? Bouli Ali has a great 5-hour YouTube course on Spring Data JPA, albeit he only showcases relational databases.

Publisher	Manning
Provider	Independent
Author	Cătălin Tudose
Prerequisites	Intermediate Java
Workload	N/A (‎616 pages)
Average Rating (Amazon & Goodreads)	4.65/5.0 (28)
Cost	Paid/Subscription

Best Paid Book for Spring Security (Laurentiu Spilca)

Spring Security in Action, Second Edition is a must-read for anyone looking to dive deep and take advantage of Spring Security’s authentication architecture and framework internals.

Written by Laurentiu Spilca, a development lead at Endava and an instructor with over a decade of teaching experience, this paid book will help you secure Java applications, covering core concepts like authentication, authorization, and common exploits and how to prevent them through real-world use cases and examples.

Split into six parts, each part covers:

1. Say Hello to Spring Security:
   • What is Spring Security, why it is important, and your first project
2. Configuring Authentication:
   • How to set up and customize authentication in Spring Security, including form-based, basic, LDAP, and more
3. Configuring Authorization:
   • What’s the difference between authority, role, and permission? Additionally, implementing authorization and filtering at the method level
4. Implementing OAuth 2 and OpenID Connect:
   • Integrating OAuth 2 and OpenID Connect for delegated authorization and single sign-on with Spring Security
5. Going Reactive:
   • Applying Spring Security to reactive applications built with Spring WebFlux and reactive data repositories
6. Testing Security Configurations:
   • Writing unit and integration tests for Spring Security configurations to ensure your security rules work as expected.

For a free alternative, you can check out Laurentiu’s Spring Security Fundamentals 2022 YouTube playlist, where he progresses Spring Security architecture concepts step-by-step.

Publisher	Manning
Provider	Independent
Author	Laurentiu Spilca
Prerequisites	Familiarity with Java and Spring
Workload	N/A (440 pages)
Rating (Amazon & Goodreads)	4.45/5.0
Cost	Paid/Subscription

Best Paid Book for Spring Cloud (Thomas Vitale)

Nowadays, most production-ready applications are deployed in the cloud using Kubernetes, and Spring Boot is no exception.

Thomas Vitale’s Cloud Native Spring in Action will guide you through the principles and practices of cloud-native application development, such as: how to build services and microservices, how to handle persistence, messaging, instrumenting for observability, configuration, and security.

While building an online bookshop example applications, you’ll also learn to work with various modern tools and frameworks, including:

• Logging with Loki, FluentBit, and Grafana
• Pipelines with tools like GitHub Actions, Kustomize, and Kubeval
• Serverless with Knative and Spring Cloud Function
• Local development with Tilt and Docker Compose
• Native compilation with GraalVM’s native-image compiler and the Spring Native project.

As expected of a book that’s 600+ pages thick, it’s very comprehensive, even covering topics like reactive spring and securing single-page applications! Thus I recommend you check out this book if any of these topics has piqued your interest.

Publisher	Manning
Provider	Independent
Author	Thomas Vitale
Prerequisites	Intermediate Java
Workload	N/A (664 pages)
Average Rating (Amazon & Goodreads)	4.62/5.0 (28)
Cost	Paid/Subscription

Best Paid Book for Nervous Beginners (Laurentiu Spilca)

If you’re looking for a good, up-to-date book to learn both Spring 6 and Spring Boot 3.0, you’re out of luck; it doesn’t exist (yet).

But don’t let that discourage you from putting the next two books on your desk — they are recommended reads by many in the Spring community thanks to their excellent handling of the Spring basics.

Spring Start Here is another of Laurentiu Spilca’s books. Aimed towards Java developers new to Spring who want a hands-on, to-the-point guide (414 pages long), you’ll learn core Spring concepts like dependency injection, aspect-oriented programming, persistent data access, web apps, etc.

The book is split into two parts: Fundamentals and Implementation:

• Fundamentals: Rather than just memorizing annotations, you’ll learn the core concepts and fundamentals of Spring
• Implementation: After the theory, comes the application. You’ll see how the Spring concepts are used in practice: from displaying the shopping cart page to different users, to making and recording transactions in banks.

Note that the book uses Spring 5.3 and Spring Boot 2.3 in its code examples.

Purchase from Amazon or Manning.

Publisher	Manning
Provider	Independent
Author	Laurentiu Spilca
Prerequisites	Beginner to intermediate Java skills
Workload	N/A (416 pages)
Average Rating (Amazon & Goodreads)	4.71/5.0 (149)
Cost	Paid/Subscription

Best Paid Book for Confident Beginners (Craig Walls)

Spring in Action, Sixth Edition is a hands-on guide to the Spring Framework, written by Craig Walls. It covers Spring 5.3 and Spring Boot 2.4.

How does this book compare to <embed>Spring Start Here? It’s more comprehensive, covering a wide array of topics such as:

• Build web applications with Spring MVC
• Persist data to relational and non-relational databases
• Secure applications with Spring Security
• Configure applications with Spring Boot
• Create REST APIs and secure them with OAuth 2
• Implement asynchronous messaging and application integration
• Explore reactive programming with Spring WebFlux and RSocket
• Monitor and administer applications with Actuator, Boot Admin, and JMX.

In fact, Laur Spilca recommends Spring in Action as further reading for his book. But if you’re confident enough in your Java and web development skills, you can immediately jump here.

Purchase from Amazon or Manning.

Publisher	Manning
Provider	Independent
Author	Craig Walls
Prerequisites	Beginner to intermediate Java skills
Workload	N/A (520 pages)
Average Rating (Amazon & Goodreads)	4.02/5.0 (1440)
Cost	Paid/Subscription

What Next?

• Follow Spring YouTubers:
  • Dan Vega
  • Laur Spilca
  • Java Techie
  • Bouali Ali

Why You Should Trust Us

Class Central, a Tripadvisor for online education, has helped 60 million learners find their next course. We’ve been combing through online education for more than a decade to aggregate a catalog of 200,000 online courses and 200,000+ reviews written by our users. And we’re online learners ourselves: combined, the Class Central team has completed over 400 online courses, including online degrees.

Best Courses Guide (BCG) Methodology

I built this guide following the now tried-and-tested methodology used in previous BCGs (you can find them all here). It involves a three-step process:

1. Research: I started by leveraging Class Central’s database and the internet. Then, I made a preliminary selection of 400+ Spring courses by rating, reviews, and bookmarks.
2. Evaluate: I read through reviews on Class Central, Reddit, and course providers to understand what other learners thought about each course and combined it with my own experience as a learner.
3. Select: Well-made courses were picked if they presented valuable and engaging content. Selection criteria includes comprehensive curriculum, affordability, release date, ratings and enrollments.

Ultimately, I used a combination of data and my own judgment to make these picks. I’m confident these recommendations will be a reliable way to learn Spring.