A free crash course on Spring and Spring Boot for total beginners
by none other than Dan Vega, the renowned Spring developer advocate for VMware. It's free and up for grabs on Youtube.

The course, at the simplest of levels, answers two fundamental questions which tend to confuse those not familiar with Spring's ecosystem:

Why are there two different projects, Spring and Spring Boot?

and

What is the difference between them ?

Dan Vega not only provides answers, but he goes on to show how to build a fully fledged Web application with the latest version, Spring Boot 3, in a tutorial that lasts almost 4 hours, code included.

The application is a Content calendar, delivered as a Spring MVC project, sporting a simple REST API front end. That API is directly called by means of a testing utility such as Postman, curl, or HTTPie.

It might sound like a simplistic application, but in reality it encompasses all that is necessary in order to understand Spring and Spring Boot:

• MVC structure
• Inversion of control/dependency injection
• Application context
• Beans
• Annotations
• Jdbctemplate and Spring Data
• Json/Jackson
• Application server setup with embedded Tomcat
• Validation
• Spring boot configuration/properties
• new Java features like Records

and all presented in layman's terms.

In order to follow along all you need is:

• Some experience with Java
• Java build tools Maven or Grade
• An IDE for Java development, typically IntelliJ or VSCode
• A REST API testing utility like Postman, curl, or HTTP Pie
• As for databases, H2 for an embedded database but at times Postgres on Docker

To keep it at a total novice level the project doesn't include any security features like login and authentication.

The course ends by making suggestions on how to go about  deploying your finished application on a platform like Azure or Railway. It also hints at Native images and points at more resources for further study.

All in all, it provides a great head start on entering Spring's world.

More Information

Spring Boot Tutorial for Beginners - 2023 Crash Course using Spring Boot 3
Github code

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