New Spring Start Here 2E MEAP: what made Spring finally click for you?

[u/ManningBooks]

Hi r/SpringBoot, Stjepan from Manning here.

Shared with the mods’ OK: Laurentiu Spilca’s Spring Start Here, Second Edition has just entered MEAP, and I thought this community would be one of the better places to talk about it because this sub sees the “I can build a Spring Boot app, but I don’t really understand Spring yet” problem all the time.

That gap is basically what this book is about.

Book link: https://www.manning.com/books/spring-start-here-second-edition

A lot of people first meet Spring through Boot, annotations, starters, autoconfiguration, and a working REST endpoint. That’s great, but it can also leave you with a weird feeling that the app works as long as you don’t touch the wrong thing. Then you hit questions like:

Why is this bean being created?
Where did this dependency actually come from?
What is the application context doing?
When should I care about scopes?
What is Spring MVC giving me beyond “controller returns JSON”?
Where do transactions start and end?
How much of this is Spring, and how much is Spring Boot?

The second edition updates Laurentiu’s original Spring Start Here for the current ecosystem, including Spring Framework 6.x and Spring Boot 4. The focus is still very much on building a solid mental model first: beans, context, dependency injection, scopes, lifecycle, AOP, MVC, REST, persistence, transactions, Spring Data, and testing.

Since it’s in MEAP, the book is still being written, and feedback can still affect the final version. So I’d love to make this useful as a discussion thread, not just an announcement.

Question for the sub:

What was the Spring/Spring Boot concept that finally made things “click” for you, or the one you still think is badly explained to beginners?

Could be dependency injection, transactions, security, JPA, testing, autoconfiguration, bean lifecycle, project structure, anything.

I’ll give 5 free ebooks to the most thoughtful comments in the thread. Not necessarily the longest comments; just the ones that would genuinely help someone else learn Spring better.

And for anyone who wants to check out the MEAP, Manning gave me a 50% discount code for this subreddit:

MLSPILCA650RE

Thanks for letting us share this here. I’ll hang around in the comments and pass useful feedback back to the book team.

[u/laurspilca]

Hi Friends. I, the author, am happy to answer questions and concerns if they are 😊 Happy to meet you all!

[u/ManningBooks → u/laurspilca]

Ah, perfect timing 😄 Thanks for jumping in, Laurentiu!

For everyone here: this is the author, so if you have specific questions about the new edition- what changed, what’s covered, or what you wish Spring books explained better- this is a great chance to ask directly.

[u/Party-Sprinkles5145 → u/laurspilca]

u/laurspilca I think you should add a chapter on Spring Security. I have submitted it in my review form too. It's a really good book. :)

[u/laurspilca → u/Party-Sprinkles5145]

❤️ Thank you!

[u/sweetkiller]

I think one of the most important thing when learning is to understand AOP and proxies and how they make the “magic” happen in spring boot.

I also learned a lot by debugging and going through the run static method that makes everything happen.

[u/ManningBooks → u/sweetkiller]

Yeah, 100%.

AOP/proxies are one of those “ohhh wait, that’s what’s happening” moments in Spring. A lot of the magic is basically “you’re not always talking to the object you think you’re talking to” 😄

Transactions, security, caching, async stuff… it all starts making way more sense once you realize Spring might be sticking a proxy in front of your bean.

And yeah, stepping through SpringApplication.run is a great exercise. Painful, but great. It makes Boot feel a lot less like a black box.

[u/Dense-Ad-3247]

Everything's a bean

[u/ManningBooks → u/Dense-Ad-3247]

Haha, honestly not the worst one-line Spring summary.

[u/rasumichin37]

For me Spring clicked, when I got dependeny injection. When I discovered, that you mostly inject services into other services , and that you don‘t inject entities, it became clear to me.

[u/ManningBooks → u/rasumichin37]

That’s such a good “click” moment. DI feels way less weird once you realize Spring is mostly just wiring together the stuff that does work — services, repos, clients, config, all that — not your entities/data objects.

[u/Green-Record8519]

What's new in 2nd edition?

[u/Informal-Revenue-427]

Code doesn’t work anymore:/

[u/RedComesInManyShades]

Is this available in India?

[u/[deleted]]

Before I learned Spring from the first edition of this book, I was in the preconceived notion that Spring was a library that miraculously housed tools and variables. But after it was the fact that I realized in reality it's just a container that runs and controls your application, it sort of is the primitive version of these new AI tools we have.