Spring Boot 4.0 shipped in November 2025 and the 4.x line has been the current generation since, with Spring Framework 7 underneath and the 3.5.x series in maintenance. Most Spring books in print were written for Spring Boot 2 or the early 3.x releases, and the namespace break between them means code listings from a Boot 2 book use javax.* imports that no longer compile. Buying a Spring Boot book in 2026 is mostly an exercise in edition awareness, so this list does that homework for you.
Last reviewed: August 2026. Every pick below was re-checked against the publisher catalog and its live Amazon listing; framing verified against Spring Boot 4.1, Spring Framework 7, and Java 25 LTS. Two picks from the previous version of this list were replaced because their editions were superseded or predate the namespace change.
| Book | Published | Covers | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spring in Action, 6th Ed (Walls) | Early 2022, Manning | Spring 5.3 / Boot 2.4 | Core concepts foundation |
| Pro Spring Boot 4 (Gutierrez, Carter) | July 2026, Apress | Spring Boot 4 | Current-generation depth |
| Microservices with Spring Boot 3 and Spring Cloud, 3rd Ed (Larsson) | August 2023, Packt | Boot 3 / Spring Cloud | Microservices on Kubernetes |
| Spring Security in Action, 2nd Ed (Spilca) | April 2024, Manning | Boot 3, OAuth2/OIDC | Authentication and authorization |
| Spring Boot 3.0 Cookbook (Puig) | July 2024, Packt | Boot 3.x | Recipe-style problem solving |
| Spring AI in Action (Walls) | November 2025, Manning | Spring AI | LLM features in Spring apps |
Prices below are approximate August 2026 bands. Print prices on technical books move often, so check the live listing before ordering.
1. Spring in Action, 6th Edition
Craig Walls has been writing Spring in Action since the first edition, and it remains the book most Java developers learn Spring from. The 6th edition walks through dependency injection, Spring MVC, Spring Data, Spring Security, reactive programming with WebFlux, and messaging with Kafka and RabbitMQ, building each concept on the previous one instead of dumping everything at once. Walls makes Spring’s abstraction layers feel logical rather than magical, and that conceptual grounding is why the book survives on this list.
Now the honest part. This edition was written against Spring 5.3 and Spring Boot 2.4, so its code listings predate the Jakarta namespace change, and as of August 2026 Manning has not published a seventh edition. The concepts transfer cleanly to Boot 4, but you will be mentally rewriting javax.* imports and some configuration as you follow along. Read it for the mental model, then lean on the current reference docs for exact code. If you want the wider Java picture around it, our list of Java programming books covers the language side.
- Author: Craig Walls
- Published: Early 2022 (Manning, 6th Edition)
- Best for: Learning core Spring concepts from scratch
- Skip it if: You want copy-paste code for current Spring Boot; the listings are Boot 2.4 era
- Price: Around $40 to $50 in print ($59.99 list), check the live price
- Amazon: Buy on Amazon
2. Pro Spring Boot 4
Felipe Gutierrez wrote the deep Spring Boot reference for the last two generations, and for this one he is joined by DaShaun Carter of the Spring team at Broadcom. Published by Apress in July 2026, this is the first major print book covering Spring Boot 4 itself: auto-configuration internals, Actuator and Micrometer observability, GraalVM native images and AOT compilation, and a chapter on wiring Spring AI into Boot applications. It targets Java 17 and 21 across 539 pages.
Because the book is weeks old, the print run is still propagating through retailers, so the paperback may show as pre-order or limited stock depending on when you look. The eBook is available immediately from Apress. Read Spring in Action first for the conceptual foundation, then reach for this when you need to understand what Boot is doing under the hood on the version you actually run in production.
- Authors: Felipe Gutierrez and DaShaun Carter
- Published: July 2026 (Apress, 4th Edition), 539 pages
- Best for: Deep Spring Boot 4 internals, GraalVM, production tuning
- Skip it if: You are still learning Spring basics; this assumes you already write Spring apps
- Price: Around $37 to $50, check the live price
- Amazon: Buy on Amazon
3. Microservices with Spring Boot 3 and Spring Cloud, 3rd Edition
Magnus Larsson’s Packt title is the pick for readers whose Spring services end up on Kubernetes, which on this site is most of you. Across 706 pages it builds a full microservice landscape on Spring Boot 3 and Spring Cloud, then deploys it the way real platform teams do: Kubernetes with Helm 3, Istio for service mesh, Prometheus and Grafana for metrics, the EFK stack for logging, distributed tracing, and native compilation with GraalVM.
No other Spring book connects the framework to the operational stack this thoroughly, and the tooling chapters pair well with our Kubernetes book picks if the cluster side is the part you need to level up.
- Author: Magnus Larsson
- Published: August 2023 (Packt, 3rd Edition), 706 pages
- Best for: Spring microservices deployed on Kubernetes with Istio and full observability
- Skip it if: You build and run monoliths; the whole book assumes a distributed system
- Price: Around $45 to $55, check the live price
- Amazon: Buy on Amazon
4. Spring Security in Action, Second Edition
Security is where Spring hurts the most people, and Laurentiu Spilca’s second edition is the book that untangles it. Fully rewritten for Spring Boot 3 and published in April 2024, it covers the filter chain, authentication providers, method security, and the OAuth2 and OpenID Connect flows that every production API eventually needs, including running your own authorization server.
The old edition’s biggest flaw was documenting the deprecated WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter style; the second edition uses the current component-based configuration throughout. None of the general Spring books on this list give security more than a chapter, which is exactly why this one earns its slot.
- Author: Laurentiu Spilca
- Published: April 2024 (Manning, 2nd Edition)
- Best for: Authentication, authorization, OAuth2 and OpenID Connect on Spring Boot 3
- Skip it if: You have not built a Spring app yet; read a foundation book first
- Price: Around $45 to $55 ($69.99 list), check the live price
- Amazon: Buy on Amazon
5. Spring Boot 3.0 Cookbook
Felip Miguel Puig’s cookbook replaces the recipe slot that Spring Boot in Practice held in the previous version of this list; that book is well written but predates Boot 3 and the namespace change. The cookbook format solves one problem per recipe on the Jakarta-era stack: securing APIs with OAuth2, documenting them with OpenAPI, testing with Testcontainers, wiring Spring Cloud Config and Eureka, adding distributed tracing, and trimming startup with native compilation.
If you already know Spring basics and want quick answers to specific problems, this format beats reading a 900-page reference front to back. Keep the framework reference docs open beside it for anything that changed after the 3.x line.
- Author: Felip Miguel Puig
- Published: July 2024 (Packt)
- Best for: Quick recipe-style solutions to specific Spring Boot problems
- Skip it if: You want a structured course-style narrative; recipes assume you know what to ask for
- Price: Around $35 to $45, check the live price
- Amazon: Buy on Amazon
6. Spring AI in Action
Craig Walls again, this time on the newest corner of the ecosystem. Published in November 2025 with a foreword by Rod Johnson, Spring AI in Action covers building LLM-backed features inside Spring applications: talking to model APIs, prompt engineering from Java, retrieval-augmented generation over your own data, and keeping the AI pieces testable. At 320 pages it is the shortest book here, and deliberately so.
Spring AI moves fast, so expect some drift between the book and the latest release. The architectural patterns it teaches hold up regardless, and it is the most complete book-length treatment of Spring AI available.
- Author: Craig Walls
- Published: November 2025 (Manning), 320 pages
- Best for: Adding LLM and RAG features to Spring applications
- Skip it if: Your apps have no AI requirement; buy it when they do
- Price: Around $36 to $60 ($59.99 list), check the live price
- Amazon: Buy on Amazon
Reading order
| Stage | Book |
|---|---|
| New to Spring and Spring Boot | Spring in Action, 6th Ed (Walls) |
| Depth on the current Boot generation | Pro Spring Boot 4 (Gutierrez, Carter) |
| Quick recipe-based solutions | Spring Boot 3.0 Cookbook (Puig) |
| Microservices on Kubernetes | Microservices with Spring Boot 3 and Spring Cloud (Larsson) |
| Locking the app down | Spring Security in Action, 2nd Ed (Spilca) |
| LLM features | Spring AI in Action (Walls) |
One habit will save you money on any Spring purchase, from any list: find the Spring Boot version in the book’s description before you buy. Jakarta versus javax imports is the dividing line; a book on the wrong side of it fights you on every code listing, no matter how good the prose is. The picks above are on the right side of that line or, in the case of Spring in Action, honest about not being there. Setting up a fresh environment to work through them? Our guide to installing OpenJDK on Ubuntu gets the toolchain in place, and if your reading list extends past Java, we keep the same edition-verified standard in our C and C++ book picks.
