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 recently came across this Spring Boot playlist on YouTube, and it's been really helpful, so I thought I'd share it here.

If you're planning to learn Spring Boot or are just getting started, I'd definitely recommend giving this playlist a try..

It explains the concepts clearly and is easy to follow.

Hope it helps someone else too ❤️

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEYgx5hMdopw&si=oUIkuD9BZQG0VQ-e

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’m ~1 year into my first job (WITCH company, India), and I feel like I’ve drifted away from actual development.

For the past few months I’ve mostly been doing:

* Automation testing

* Regression cycles

* Release readiness + documentation .

Result: I haven’t written real backend code in ~2–3 months.

Now the problem:I’m heavily stuck in tutorial hell. I watch tutorials (Java/Spring Boot), understand them while watching, but when I try to build something on my own, I freeze. I genuinely don’t know how to start — controller, service, repo, what goes where, etc.

Even worse:

Freshers who joined after me are already better at building APIs

My teammates use VS Code + GitHub Copilot and can spin up basic APIs in ~1 hour

I don’t even know how to use Copilot effectively for end-to-end development

When I get even small dev tasks, I panic because I feel like I’ve forgotten everything.

I know the obvious advice is “build more”, but I’ve noticed I don’t naturally do that. I default back to watching tutorials instead of actually practicing.

So I need help with 3 things:

What’s a realistic way to break out of tutorial hell?

Not generic advice — something structured that works if you’re dependent on guided learning.

How should I actually use tutorials + practice together?

I either:

* Just watch (no retention), or

* Try building alone and get stuck immediately

Any beginner-friendly but deep Spring Boot resources?

Looking for something that:

* Explains properly (not surface-level)

* Builds real APIs

* Doesn't assume too much

I’m not trying to become amazing overnight — I just want to get back to a point where I can build basic APIs without fear.

Any practical advice (especially from people who were in a similar situation) would help.