I’ve found some books on design pattern to be quite dry. The lack of examples and clear explanations have also been a put off. Finally comes a great site that documents design patterns, explains their use clearly and even provides examples in Java and C++.

All patterns contained in book form for the bargain price of $10.

Javabeat has a great set of Tutorials to get you started with Spring. All tutorials include samples.

• Spring MVC
• Spring and Hibernate
• Spring Web Framework
• Spring Web Flow
• Spring AOP
  This is the simplest explanation of AOP ever!

Also check out this tutorial on using Spring’s MVC for Web Form Validation.

I also like Spring on Rails - which generates simple CRUDS with either Hibernate or iBatis DAO layers.

While on simple tutorials - an easy to follow JUnit 4 and Eclipse tutorial.’

Mmmmm — the above sentence contains the words simple and Eclipse. …. But its true now that I have more ram.

Useful tutorial to follow if you want to get into Spring — well just Spring, the mvc component and web form validation.

JMAGE is very cool. It is a JSP tag lib that makes it very easy to do image processing. It has tags to resize, crop, rotate, brighten, darken, ovelay an image, add a background, add text, convert to greyscale, blur, detect edges and apply a lowpass filter. This could certainly be used to create a Web 2.0 service.