Introduction

Three years have passed since I wrote my first Spring project and I regret that this framework grew for ten years without me knowing about it. Four major versions of Spring have been released so far and except for the official study guide required to pass the certification exam, until the conception of this book there was no additional resource such as this.

This study guide provides a complete overview of all the technologies involved in creating a Spring web application from scratch. It guides you step by step into the Spring web world covering Spring 3 and Spring 4. It also covers topics not required for the certification exam, such as Portlets and Thymeleaf, which most developers encounter while in the field.

There are two multi-module projects associated with this book, covering every example presented in the book. As the book was written, new versions of Spring were released, a new version of Intellij IDEA was released, and new versions of Gradle were released. I upgraded to the new versions in order to provide the most recent information and keep this book synchronized with the official documentation. A group of reviewers has gone over the book, but if you notice any inconsistency, please send an email to editorial@apress.com and errata will be created.

The example source code for this book can be found on GitHub and will be maintained, synchronized with new versions of the technologies, and enriched based on the recommendation of the developers using it to learn Spring.

http://github.com/iuliana/personal-records
https://github.com/iuliana/book-code

I truly hope you will enjoy using this book to learn Spring as much as I enjoyed writing it.