spring-and-hibernate-for-beginners: fourteen course projects on one branch

One repository, fourteen self-contained project directories

The repository is not an application. It is a sequence of projects, and the directory names make the curriculum visible without opening a single file.

The list runs from 01-spring-core-5 through 02-spring-mvc-5, 03-hibernate-5 and 04-spring-mvc-crud-5, then 05-spring-aop-5, 07-spring-security-5 and 08-spring-rest, and then the Spring Boot block: 09-spring-boot, 10-spring-boot-rest-crud-with-hibernate, 11-spring-boot-rest-crud-with-jpa, 12-spring-boot-rest-crud-with-spring-data-jpa, 13-spring-boot-rest-crud-with-spring-data-rest, and 14-spring-boot-thymeleaf.

Two details are worth noticing. The numbering skips 06, so a lesson slot was either removed or never committed, and the trailing 5 on the early directories marks them as the Spring 5 generation while the Spring Boot block has no such suffix, since the Boot line was where the course moved on.

The most instructive set is the four consecutive Spring Boot CRUD directories, from 10 through 13. They take the same problem and solve it four ways: with Hibernate, with plain JPA, with Spring Data JPA, and with Spring Data REST. That progression is the real teaching device of the repository, and it is a better way to understand the difference between those layers than any single finished example would be.

The repository topics confirm the coverage: spring, spring-boot, spring-mvc, spring-security, spring-data-jpa, spring-data-rest, hibernate, jpa, aop, crud, rest, mysql, maven, tutorial and udemy.

Why the code is on the master branch and what the versioning tags tell you

The default branch is master, and the version tags on the repository look like course revisions rather than library releases. The list runs 30.0, 31.0 and 32.0, and the note on the newest one is specific: 32.0: Updated to Spring Security 5.7.3 - resolved deprecated code.

That entry is the clearest signal in the repository about how a course codebase ages. Spring Security 5.7.3 was the fix for deprecated code, and it was applied in a revision tagged 32.0, published on 2022-08-22. The earlier tags are 31.0 from 2020-06-06 and 30.0 from 2020-01-07, the latter described as bumping Maven dependencies for Jackson and c3p0.

Those two words are worth pausing on. Jackson is the JSON layer every Spring Boot REST application depends on, and c3p0 is a connection pool. A course that has to bump its JSON library and its pool library by hand tells you that those versions are not floating, and that a student following along in a later year may hit version conflicts that the course never covered.

The repository itself is not archived, and the last push was on 2026-04-19. So the code is still receiving changes, but the published revisions stop in 2022, which means the tag history and the working tree are two different timelines.

There is also no homepage for the repository and no packaging to speak of. This is course source code, and the deliverable is the understanding.

A custom licence with real limits: you may use the code, you may not teach from it

The licence is the thing to read before anything else here, and it is not one of the standard permissive licences. GitHub records it as a custom licence, with the LICENSE file at the root holding the full terms.

What the README states about the permissions is generous for a learner. The source code and related course files are provided for personal learning and educational use as part of a course by luv2code LLC. You may use and modify the source code for your own personal projects. You may use and modify it in your work or professional projects, including commercial applications. You may integrate or extend the source code to build your own applications. No action or special requests are required for any of that.

The prohibitions are where the interesting part is. You may not republish, redistribute or upload any course files, including videos, slides, images, text or PDFs. You may not use any course files to create derivative educational content such as tutorials, blog posts, YouTube videos, online courses, training content or social media content. You may not use them in teaching, training or commercial educational products. And you may not claim any course files as your own work.

Read together, the effect is that the code is usable inside your own product, including a commercial one, but the teaching content around it is protected, and a blog post or a course built on top of the course file is out of bounds. That distinction matters for anyone who assumed a GitHub source repository was free to republish by default, which it is not here. Permission requests go to a dedicated copyright address listed in the README.

The successor repository: the same course rebuilt on Spring Boot 4

The first substantive thing in the README is a notice, and it is there because the author has moved on. An updated version of the course is available based on Spring Boot 4, with a Udemy course link and a new Git repository link for Spring Boot 4, Spring 7 and Hibernate for Beginners, in a repository named spring-boot-4-spring-7-hibernate-for-beginners.

That single sentence reframes everything else in this repository. The Spring 5 code here is not the current version of the teaching files, it is the previous edition, kept online because the students already enrolled in it need the code to match the videos they are watching.

For a reader deciding what to learn from, the practical question is which generation you need. The Spring Boot 4, Spring 7 and Hibernate course covers the current framework generation, and this repository covers the Spring 5 and early Spring Boot generation. The two are separate codebases with separate licences, so mixing them in one project is not a thing either one supports.

The README also routes support to a classroom discussion forum on Udemy rather than to the issue tracker, and the rest of it is a catalogue of the author's other courses. There is a Spring Boot learning path listed as core courses, a project course for Spring Boot with Spring MVC and Thymeleaf, a REST API course with four projects, full stack courses in Angular and React, and a Playwright course for browser test automation.

That catalogue is a hint about the intended audience, since every entry is a paid Udemy course and this repository is the public sample that accompanies them.

What is actually in the tree, and what the reader can do with it

The repository root holds little besides the course directories: a .gitignore, the LICENSE file, the README and an images/ directory used for the course thumbnail. There is no Dockerfile, no CI configuration, no application.properties at the root, no build wrapper and no single entry point. Each numbered directory stands on its own, and you would open the one that matches the topic you are studying.

There is also no build instruction in the README, and no install command to copy. The stated route to getting help or to working through the code is the classroom discussion forum, which means the intended workflow is: find the lesson, open the matching numbered project, and ask questions in the forum if the project does not behave as the video expects.

That absence of a single run command is the honest characterisation of what this repository is. It is a set of solved examples, arranged so that a concept can be compared across frameworks, rather than a project you clone and run. If you want to run something, you pick a directory, and the topic list tells you the toolchain involved: Maven for the build, MySQL for the database, Spring Security for the security chapters, and Thymeleaf for the final server-rendered one.

What a reader gets that a documentation site does not is the working intermediate states. The same CRUD application implemented with Hibernate and then with JPA and then with Spring Data JPA and then with Spring Data REST is precisely the comparison that documentation tends to describe in prose and code samples that do not run side by side.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt this repository as a reference if you want to see how a working Spring application is put together for a specific topic, since the numbered directories let you compare the same CRUD problem solved with Hibernate, with JPA, with Spring Data JPA and with Spring Data REST. Do not adopt it as a dependency or a starting template, because the licence restricts redistribution and derivative educational content, and the code targets the Spring 5 generation. Before you build on it, read the LICENSE file yourself, check that the Spring 5 APIs are still what you want, and plan to move to the separate Spring Boot 4 course repository if you are starting a new project today.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. darbyluv2code/spring-and-hibernate-for-beginners on GitHub
2. Issues
3. README
4. Releases