Spring Web Essentials

If you want to learn how to develop modern web applications with Spring, this book is for you. Part one covers using Spring to power secure, industrial-grade web services ready to support modern web applications built with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and JavaScript such as Angular, React, and Vue. In part two, we develop a more traditional server-side HTML web application.

Why this book and not some other Spring book on the market?

The first version of Spring came out in 2003 when Java lacked many of the capabilities that make it a great language today, like generics, annotations, and variable arguments. As the language brought more natural ways of doing things, Spring improved to take advantage of them. Strong backward compatibility is one of the five major design philosophies of Spring, but it also means there are new, older, and much older ways of doing things. Documenting all of them makes for thick books. 

Second, older books don't cover the magic that is Spring Boot, which significantly simplifies configuring and running Spring applications. It's no longer an arduous task to get a Spring application up and running, so why should you learn how to do lots of unnecessary work? Finally, newer books cover Spring boot but often lack the level of detail needed to deploy real applications to production, including unit tests, bean validation, and security. This book presents a complete example leaving you ready to work on industrial-grade Spring applications.

As a teacher, my reading assignments often had a longer list of what to skip than what to read. I wrote this book to use in the classroom with a focus on current best practices covering what students need to know. We follow a test-driven, standards-based approach. The text is full of links to documentation and reference information for each new concept presented.