This reference guide provides detailed information about the Spring Framework. It provides comprehensive documentation for all features, as well as some background about the underlying concepts (such as "Dependency Injection") that Spring has embraced.

If you are just getting started with Spring, you may want to begin using the Spring Framework by creating a Spring Boot based application. Spring Boot provides a quick (and opinionated) way to create a production-ready Spring based application. It is based on the Spring Framework, favors convention over configuration, and is designed to get you up and running as quickly as possible.

You can use start.spring.io to generate a basic project or follow one of the "Getting Started" guides like the Getting Started Building a RESTful Web Service one. As well as being easier to digest, these guides are very task focused, and most of them are based on Spring Boot. They also cover other projects from the Spring portfolio that you might want to consider when solving a particular problem.