Spring Start Here, Second Edition

Spring Start Here, Second Edition by Laurenţiu Spilcă is a foundations-first introduction to the Spring framework. Perfect for Spring beginners, it steadily builds understanding through practical projects that explore the main ideas of Spring: configuration, beans, web endpoints, data access, and application structure. Whether you’re building directly with Spring Framework or optimizing apps you kick off with Spring Boot, you’ll move forward with the confidence that you really understand what’s going on under the hood.

Fully updated for Spring Framework 7 and Spring Boot 4, this practical book prepares you for fast development, clean application design, efficient cloud-native systems, and reliably-secure applications. Along the way, you’ll learn some best practices for applying your knowledge of Spring fundamentals when you’re using AI and agentic coding tools. Informative graphics, relevant examples, and author Laurenţiu Spilcă's clear and lively writing make it easy to pick up the skills you need.

This book is hands-on from start to finish. You’ll love how the simple projects illuminate the complex concepts that often trip up beginners. You'll refactor an existing application to Spring, use Spring tools to make SQL database requests and REST calls, and secure your projects with Spring Security. You’ll also get an insightful introduction to the vast Spring ecosystem.

Building on a successful first edition, this new revision adds coverage of Spring 7’s new tools such as RestClient, fresh coverage on approaching Spring in the AI-development era, and how to properly use AI when building Spring Apps.