Learning Spring

Hi All,

After about so many desktop project involving SWT, we are to be given a web project again..

But we were ask what framework we will use? Previously we were able to do simple projects using Struts but it was
Struts 1.

As I have been reading here in the ranch, many are using Spring so we decided to jump in and start reading about this framework.

I just have some questions:

1. According to the post that I am seeing when I do Search, they are saying that Spring documentation is very okay.
Are they referring to this link http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.0.x/reference/index.html. I am not sure if this will help ease my learning..

2. My initial reading talks about IOC/Dependency Injection. I am not familiar about this, do you know any site that I could read on?

3. Spring also has so many modules based on the documentation. It mentions about Spring IDE/Weblow/MVC and dozens of other module. Do I need to know all of this. As per my reading, I should be focusing on Spring MVC. I just want to do web application, is this right?

4. What good books could I buy to teach me the needed module of Spring to get me started on Spring?
-Spring in Action (Covers 2.0 Spring?)
-Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow (Amazon has so many low ratings on this book)
-Spring Recipe (A Problem-Solution Approach) (I think there's one chapter on MVC only
-Wrox book Professional Spring

5. What version of Spring should we study 2.0, 2.5 or the latest 3.0?

Sorry if my question might be so many and could be really dumb but I just want to get the expert advice before I invest so much in my time learning

Looking forward to your expert advise...

1. It would surely help. I recommend http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/reference/
2. You could study from the reference documentation.
3. Yes.
4. For me, Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow is a very good book, if you want to study Spring Web MVC, I recommend this book.
5. For now, I recommend 2.5.x as it's the latest stable version.

Here you have great Spring tutorials, but keep closer to the documentation as it is the best guide to learn Spring.

2) For learning about DI/IoC just search the web. The references I usually point people at are [Fowler DI, Fowler IoC, and Wikipedia IoC] for introductory purposes.

3) Which to focus on depends on your application. Obviously MVC, but the ORM stuff is very important if you want to access data, the AOP stuff is important to understand transaction handling (and other chores).

4) Pro Spring 2.5 (Apress) is also a reasonable choice. I'm not a huge fan of their books, but it still has useful information and covers 2.5.