Thread: Best way to learn Spring (and Hibernate) from scratch

Dear all,

I want (and need) to learn Spring (and possible other modern enterprise Java development technologies, like Hibernate) practically from scratch.

I know the Java language quite well, but on my previous workplace I had very little exposure to Spring, Hibernate and other modern Java technologies.

I am sort of aware of what Spring is about. It uses coding conventions (called beans) to decouple program components, certain things are marked with annotations and then the framework initializes user classes using reflection. That's pretty much all I understand. I do not have a bigger picture on how the Spring application is built and how it functions.

What is the best way to learn Spring?

How did you learn Spring?

What is the difference between Spring versions? AFAIK Spring 5 is the current version. Is it worth reading the book on Spring v3?

I tried some video tutorials on YouTube, but many of them are paid, do not give code, have a pace too slow.