by John Turner
Posted on October 27, 2009
The Core Spring training course delivered by Spring Source is their flagship training product covering a significant proportion of the functionality provided by the Spring Framework and Spring Security libraries. I had been considering taking this training course for some time and given that Spring Source began delivering the course in Ireland and I had some free time I registered for a course in July 09.
The course is run over 4 days and the Spring Source website provides a detailed breakdown of the course content. Going into the course I had several years experience working with the Spring Framework so many of the topics were already familiar to me. What I wanted to get out of the course was to reinforce the knowledge I already had, find new ways of accomplishing the same tasks and to explore areas of the framework I had not yet touched on. I also wanted to take the associated certification.
The course itself was very well delivered and included a hard copy of the course slides and a USB memory key which contained all the material required for the course. This was extremely useful as you could take away the practical labs and instructions (provided in PDF) and undertake these in your own time. This was to prove even more helpful when later studying for the certification exam.
Given the well defined structure of the course, the material covered followed the syllabus closely but there was ample time to explore different ways of accomplishing the same task. The instructor was very knowledgeable about what would work in the real world and what the trade offs were when choosing one method over another. It was clear that the instructor not only knew the training material well but was very experienced in using the Spring Framework to deliver real world applications.
Even though I already had several years experience with the Spring Framework I found the course was beneficial and I was able to apply some of the things I learned straight away. It would be possible to learn the same from the reference material and forums but the manner in which the course was delivered made the learning painless. The 50-50 split between lecture and practical also really helped to reinforce the key concepts.
NOTE: I cannot provide copies of the course material and will ignore any requests for same.