Preparation for the Spring 5 Certification
Introduction
This repository contains my code examples for the preparation of the certification. I have passed the certification on the 20th july of 2019, I have been certified with a score of 88%. This repository contains some good references to master the fundamentals of the framework, so It's not only for a certification purpose.
The certification questions are based on the official study-guide, so I recommend to focus on those questions. In my opinion, if you can easily awnsers those questions, you will pass the certification.
To prepare my certification, I read few books, a lot of articles, I watched many Pluralsight courses and some Youtube videos on specific subjects.
To help you prepare the certification, I recommend to learn from the following resources, some are not free, but they thy are worth.
The best resources to follow
Core Spring 5 Certification in Detail by Ivan Krizsan This book should be a must for everyone willing to pass the certification, it should be checked only as a last step before passing the certification, so for the newcomers to the framework I don't recommend to begin with, because it is just a summary and it contains some responses that could be helpful to pass the certification.
Books
Spring in Action: Covers Spring 4:
I don't recommend the fifth edition, the 4th edition is a good start for everyone willing to understand the fundamentals of the Framework, like Dependency Injection, Aspect Oriented Programming.... It is not mandatory to read every chapter. It is the first resource i have checked, I didn't read the full book, but only few chapters, let's say 50% of the book.
A really good book that helped me to dig deeper into the framework. It will help you to understand how the Spring Framework is using some design patterns internally.
For a deeper understanding of the Spring boot module. The book is not big but it gives more details about the spring boot modules. Apart from that, I have watched many youtube videos to get much understanding of the spring boot modules, I recommend to check some talks given by Stéphane Nicoll about spring boot.
Youtube channel
Laurentiu Spilca made a playlist on Spring Fundamentals, you will find very good content on DI, AOP, Transaction, Data, Rest, Actuator and many more, recently he made a playlist about spring security...
Pluralsight courses(paid but worth it)
AOP
Spring JDBC
Building Applications Using Spring JDBC
Spring data jpa
Getting Started with Spring Data JPA
Spring Boot
Creating Your First Spring Boot Application
Spring Boot: Efficient Development, Configuration, and Deployment
Stackoverflow questions
Here are some responses to some very important questions:
- java - @RequestBody and @ResponseBody annotations in Spring - Stack Overflow.
- java - ApplicationContext and ServletContext - Stack Overflow.
- Differences between Abstract Factory Pattern and Factory Method - Stack Overflow.
- java - BeanFactoryPostProcessor and BeanPostProcessor in lifecycle events - Stack Overflow.
- java - Difference between <context:annotation-config> vs <context:component-scan> - Stack Overflow.
- java - Difference between applicationContext.xml and spring-servlet.xml in Spring Framework - Stack Overflow.
- java - Difference between Interceptor and Filter in Spring MVC - Stack Overflow.
- java - Hibernate SessionFactory vs. EntityManagerFactory - Stack Overflow.
- java - How do I update an entity using spring-data-jpa? - Stack Overflow.
- java - How do servlets work? Instantiation, sessions, shared variables and multithreading - Stack Overflow.
- java - How to accept Date params in a GET request to Spring MVC Controller? - Stack Overflow.
- java - How to access a value defined in the application.properties file in Spring Boot - Stack Overflow.
- java - PUT request in Spring MVC - Stack Overflow.
- java - Spring MVC: How to perform validation? - Stack Overflow.
- java - What are the possible values of the #Hibernate hbm2ddl.auto configuration and what do they do - Stack Overflow.
- java - What is @ModelAttribute in Spring MVC? - Stack Overflow.
- java - What is a NoSuchBeanDefinitionException and how do I fix it? - Stack Overflow.
- java - What's the difference between ResponseEntity and HttpEntity in Spring_ - Stack Overflow.
- Spring JdbcTemplate execute vs update - Stack Overflow.
- spring - How to implement RowMapper using java lambda expression - Stack Overflow.
- spring boot - Difference between using MockMvc with SpringBootTest and Using WebMvcTest - Stack Overflow.
- What is the difference between BeanPostProcessor and init/destroy method in Spring? - Stack Overflow.
- Spring Boot - Loading Initial Data - Stack Overflow.
- java - BeanPostProcessor confusion - Stack Overflow.
- Using Spring ResponseEntity to Manipulate the HTTP Response.
- Spring MVC and the @ModelAttribute Annotation | Baeldung.
- Spring AOP AspectJ @AfterThrowing Example.
- Difference between getOne and findById in Spring Data JPA?.
- Difference Between BeanFactory and ApplicationContext in Spring.
Other resources
Git repository: This repository contains responses of the the official study-guide questions.
Git repository: This second repository contains the responses of the official study-guide questions and also explanations of the theoretical notion we deal with in the Certification.
Git repository: This third repository, even if it is about the spring 4 certification, you can find very good content and explanation about the spring ecosystem.
Personal opinion
Sometimes even if the resources are valuable, it can be hard to understand some subjects, for my personal experience, i try to see the prerequisites of the complicated subject. It depends also on your background on Spring and some design patterns used by the framework.
In parallel with that, I read a lot of answers from Stackoverflow, just google what you don't understand.