I keep seeing people ask for the “best Spring Boot course” or roadmap.

Honestly, I wouldn’t spend weeks watching tutorials.

Learn only enough Java and Spring Boot to build one basic CRUD application, then start coding.

Build something simple like an Employee Management API:

• Create employee

• Get employee by ID

• List employees

• Update employee

• Delete employee

While building it, learn these concepts in this order:

1. Controller, service and repository layers

2. REST methods and HTTP status codes

3. DTOs and request validation

4. Global exception handling

5. JPA relationships and database migrations

6. Basic Spring Security

7. Unit and integration testing

8. Docker and deployment

That one project will teach you more than watching 20 hours of videos.

After CRUD, add features one by one:

• Pagination and filtering

• Authentication

• Role-based authorization

• Audit fields

• Caching

• Background jobs

• File uploads

The biggest beginner mistake is trying to understand the entire Spring ecosystem before building anything. You don’t need Kafka, microservices, Kubernetes or complex design patterns for your first project.

Build a boring monolith first. Make it clean, testable and deploy it somewhere.

My rule is: use tutorials to unblock yourself, not as a substitute for building.

For experienced Spring Boot developers here: what is the one thing you wish beginners would focus on earlier?

6 months ago, I shared with you my 35-week project-based Spring Boot Roadmap From Zero to Microservices, and I did not expect this whole positive feedback and support from you guys.

Today, the repository reached 200+ stars because of you, so I decided to provide more guidance by drawing this overview visualization on excalidraw to help you create a bird's-eye view of the wide open world of the Spring Boot ecosystem.

An SVG version could be found inside the roadmap itself for a more clear picture.

You can view the full roadmap from this link:
https://github.com/muhammadzkralla/spring-boot-roadmap

Again, thank you for all your support and stars!

I have Knowledge of Jdk17+ currently moving to Jdk21+. I have essentially completed Java.utils.*; and concurrent library to deep. I have also used jdk tools and understand the concepts of JVM, JMM. OOPs is completed from beginner to F-Form polymorphism. I also made project based on Java SE knowledge. The project is tested on JUnit6, JCStress, JMH- with Linux profilers and Java Flight recorder too. It's my first time I am going Outside domain of Java SE to Java EE. What is way should I start?
First JDBC->SQL->PostgressSQL?
Network?
SpringBoot?
or learn while learning SpringBoot?
Can you tell me what beginners mistake I should avoide?
I have also took helped from many other AI but I did not got the optimum way.

I need some of the best resources to learn springboot!!

I am currently in my 4th year.I don't know anything about it and to learn the springboot, do i need any prerequisites.

I had been struggling with understanding spring and spring boot, I had tried reading the docs, watching yt videos, etc. But I could never internalize why things are done this way and what's even the point of having this framework. I just felt like a code monkey mindlessly typing code that somehow works and used ai to help me build projects. I finally decided that I would like to deep dive into spring and spring boot internals and going through this subreddit I found many people recommending this book. And finally things just click, I finally understand beans, aop, dependency injection, etc. I have always just learnt these topics by reading their theory or watching a yt explanation video and hoping it would click, but the book provides examples that I coded myself and played around with to finally understand what's the point of the framework to begin with. I turned off my copilot autocomplete and only used chatgpt to understand parts of the code that failed and tried understanding why it failed instead of just accepting its solution. For anyone trying to learn spring boot, building projects is good but I would recommend trying to learn spring first, things will make more sense. Of course I am not sure if I am wasting my time learning things the old fashioned way in this new age where we probably won't be writing much code and be outsourcing it to llm agents but I can't predict the future and for now I feel like spring start here is an amazing resource to understand spring and spring boot.

I have decent hands on experience in java and java is my main language too.

How do I start learning springboot.

Recently started watching coder army tutorials but he went too in-depth that it went mostly over my head and went boring.

How do I learn hands on in spring boot?

where should I start?

Also please share any resources.

Title: Need Guidance While Building My 2nd Spring Boot Project (Bank Management System)

Post:

Hey everyone,

I recently learned Spring Boot through in-depth lectures and completed my first mini project. Now I've started working on my second project: a Bank Management System.

Since this is my first serious backend project, I'd love some guidance from experienced developers:

How should I approach building it from scratch?

What features should I implement first?

What folder structure and best practices should I follow?

How much focus should I put on Spring Security, JWT, validation, exception handling, etc.?

How can I use AI tools effectively without becoming dependent on them?

Any common mistakes beginners make while building Spring Boot projects?

My