Spring Boot 4: Beginner to Intermediate

This is the course to start with if you know some Java but have never built a web application with it. Rather than working through framework features in isolation, we build one REST API from an empty directory and introduce each piece of Spring Boot at the point where you actually need it.

That means dependency injection shows up when the code gets awkward without it, and persistence shows up when holding data in a list stops being good enough. By the end the framework should feel like a set of answers to problems you have already hit, not a list of annotations to memorise.

What you build

A task manager REST API backed by a real database.

What you learn

• Create and structure a Spring Boot project from scratch
• Build REST controllers, and understand what Spring is doing behind the annotations
• Use dependency injection deliberately rather than by cargo cult
• Persist data with Spring Data JPA and map entities to tables
• Validate incoming requests and return sensible error responses
• Configure an application across environments without hardcoding anything

Before you start

• Core Java: classes, interfaces, collections, generics
• No prior Spring or web framework experience needed