Top 5 Spring Professional Certification Exam Resources for Java Developers
Preparing for Spring Professional Certifications? These books, courses, and practice tests can help you.
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Ever since Pivotal has announced that Spring training is not mandatory for becoming a Pivotal Certified Spring developer, more and more experienced Java programmers who have been using Spring for years are preparing for this prestigious certification.
This is obvious because the expensive Spring training, which cost around 32000 USD in the USA and most of the western nations and about 50,000 INR in India, was the biggest hurdle in getting Spring certified.
Even though the training is the best way to prepare for certification because it is totally focused on the certification exams and you will cover all topics there, it is not affordable for most Java developers around the world. Now, the cost of Spring certification has just been reduced to 200 USD from the whopping 3200 USD it cost earlier.
The move to allow Java developers to appear in Spring certification without mandatory training has also encouraged the popular self-study model, which is quite popular because even traditional Oracle Java certifications are based upon that.
It allows programmers to prepare at their own pace and it's also not very expensive. All you need is a study guide and a Spring mock exam simulator.
Even though you can use Spring framework books to prepare for certifications, the study guide is particularly essential. The study guide has many benefits over general books like they are focused on the certification exam. They fully cover all topics and have topic-wise assessment questions.
They also do an excellent job of highlighting key concepts from the exam point of view. If you want to do well on Spring certification, it is a must that you choose a study guide and a course for your preparation, and you will find a log of excellent resources in this article.
Spring Professional Certification Exam Resources
Unfortunately, there are not many resources available to prepare for Spring certifications because it is still not that popular as compared to Oracle’s Java certification. One reason for that was a few developers opting for Spring certification due to expensive mandatory training.
Now that restriction is lifted, you can expect more study guides, books, and mock exams will come to help Spring developers prepare by themselves for Spring certifications.
Btw, If you are an experienced Java developer and using the Spring framework for a couple of years and you think that you can pass Spring certification without much preparation, I suggest you first go through David Mayer’s Online Spring Mock test, It’s a free test, and if you can score over 80% then you are ready for the real exam.
Anyway, here are a couple of useful study guides and online training courses for Spring certification currently available in the market. This list includes study guides for Spring core, Spring web, and Spring Enterprise Integration certifications.
1. Spring Professional Certification Exam Tutorial
This is an excellent course on Udemy, which is specially designed for Spring certification and currently. This is a multi-part course, and each part covers one module, there are 8 modules to prepare for Spring certification.
This course explains and answers all questions from the Spring Professional Certification Study Guide. Each answer to exam the topic is explained in detail with a video tutorial, description, and a good example for you to get a deep understanding of the discussed topic.
With this course, you will get all the required knowledge and skills to pass the Spring Professional Certification Exam.
Here is the link to join this course — Spring Professional Certification Exam Tutorial
The course is divided into 8 modules:
- Module 01 — Container, Dependency, and IoC
- Module 02 — Aspect-Oriented Programming
- Module 03 — Data Management: JDBC, Transactions, JPA, Spring Data
- Module 04 — Spring Boot
- Module 05 — Spring MVC and The Web Layer
- Module 06 — Security
- Module 07 — REST
- Module 08 — Testing
This is the first module of the entire course, and inside, you can find answers to all topics from Spring Professional Certification Study Guide's first section, which is Container, Dependency, and IoC.
2. Official Spring Professional Exam Study Guide
This is a free study guide for the Spring Core Professional Certification version 5 from Pivotal itself. It contains some frequently asked questions and information about the exam itself.
It also includes puzzles that test whether you know the essential concepts or not. These Spring questions are also an excellent resource for an interview.
If you are using Spring for a couple of years, then you already know the answers to most of them. They are also useful to quickly check if you are ready for Spring certification or not because the passing percentage is quite high for Spring certification. You need to get 38 out of 50 questions to pass the Spring certification.
In general, If you can answer those questions along with David Mayer’s online Spring Professional Dumps, then you are ready for the real exam.
3. Pivotal Certified Spring Professional Certification Exam: A Study Guide
This is a proper study guide for Spring core certification. It covers all topics and essential concepts. It also has topic-wise questions for Spring certification to prepare well. One book, which you can combine with Spring in Action to prepare really well for the exam.
4. Official Spring Core Professional Exam Brief
This is another free study guide from Pivotal, which contains some must-know information about Spring certification and topic-wise questions to check your understanding.
It just contains topic-wise distribution and how much weigtage each topic hold in the real exam. It also contains some useful information for the exam itself like a number of questions, format, and passing score.
And you can also use them for preparing Spring interviews.
5. Spring Framework 5: Beginner to Guru
There are not many courses out there that cover Spring 5, which is very important if you are preparing for Spring Professional v5.0 certification.
This course not only covers the Spring framework in-depth but also explains all the new features of Spring 5.0 like the Reactive Programming model and support for Java 8 and JUnit 5.
Here is the link to join this course — Spring Framework 5: Beginner to Guru
That’s all about some of the best resources to prepare for Spring certifications. We have looked at some of the best study guides available for the Spring core, Spring web developer exam, and Spring Enterprise Integration Specialist exam.
I have also shared a couple of books to learn the Spring framework in general before reading a study guide to focus more on exam topics.
The study guide offers several benefits over the conventional publications like they cover all exam topics and also have topic-wise quizzes, multiple-choice questions to prepare better, but the courses on Udemy are also great, and you can use them in conjunction with a study guide and book to prepare better.
I have also created a Spring certification practice test with 250+ questions from all exam topics which you can buy on Udemy.
Other Spring Certification Resources For Java Developers
- Spring Framework Masterclass — Beginner to Expert
- How to Crack Spring Certification in the first attempt
- Java & Moie’s Core Spring 4.2 Certification Exam PDF
- Java SE 11 Certification Books and Courses
- Spring Certification Benefits and Advantage
- Top 5 Courses to learn Spring Boot in depth
- Spring Certification Books and PDF
- Top 5 Courses to learn Spring Cloud from scratch
- Top 5 Courses to learn RESTful Web Services with Spring
- Top 5 Courses to Learn Microservices with Spring
Thanks for reading this article, if you find these resources useful then please share them with your friends and colleagues. If you have any other resources which help prepare for Spring certification, then feel free to share them with us.
P.S. — If you are an experienced Java developer and using the Spring framework for 3 to 5 years and want to get certified for your skill, I suggest you go through David Mayer’s Online Spring Mock test; it’s a free test. If you can score over 80%, then you are ready for the real exam.