Mike's Blog

So I have been working on becoming Spring Certified for a couple months now, and it was quite a slog of learning and becoming prepared.

A couple of months ago I decided to get serious with my studying and plan to take the Spring certification: Getting Spring Certified .

Originally, I had planned on detailing my study habits and what I did on a regular basis in order to share what I learned; however, I quickly realized that my notes and details were in no way ready to be consumed by anyone other than myself. I have tons of notes where I was just writing out interesting facts that I was reading so I could review them later. Additionally, I took the samples that were given by the listed resources and made countless little tweaks and adjustments so I could better understand what was happening under the hood. Finally, I found that most of what I was doing was really only helpful to me because it was based on what I was missing or not understanding.

All that said, I want to mention there are several points of interest that I discovered along the way.

1. There’s not a lot of content that isn’t either Spring Boot focused or influenced.
   • This is a good and a bad thing. On one hand a lot of the material out there just focuses on topics that you would actually use when dealing with the framework, but there is a lot of magic and auto-configuration caused by Spring Boot that you just won’t realize.
2. Spring has been around for a long time!
   • This is a mature project with a lot of documentation and information around it. This is great because you can find lots of answers to your questions, you should just realize that you can end up going down a rabbit hole of information that may or may not relate to the certification.
3. There’s not a lot of information on getting certified.
   • I was honestly surprised how little content there is to become a certified Spring developer. I could only find one book published by a major publisher, and this book is over a thousand (1000) pages long and even at this size has to make trade-offs on what to include. There’s other content out there, but I couldn’t find anything written by the Spring team or any other “authorized” source.
4. Such a broad topic.
   • While I mentioned this in December, I was honestly beginning around the November time frame. Even when I was serious about learning this, I kept having to review topics I had already studied because the book and information was so dense I felt like I had forgotten what I had learned.
   • Also, I really wish there were more examples and officially supported sources. I cannot stress this enough, because I’d go into topics only to review the documentation, which to be fair is ok but not great to study from, and then find out code samples would use Spring Boot’s auto-configuration to make running them easier. I really wish there were more Non-Boot Spring examples