When I was still at university, I started working on a place where Spring was used... they gave me a book called "Spring in Action" to read. I loved reading it and everything made much more sense after that... I highly recommend trying to get a deep understanding of something so central to an application like Spring before you start doing anything more advanced with it. You wouldn't want to drive a F1 car without first learning how to do it properly, it may be fun at first but you're likely to crash and burn.