6 Best Maven Online Courses for Beginners in 2021
Tags: Tools, Software Development, Maven, Java, Programming

6 Best Maven Online Courses for Beginners in 2021

These are the best online courses to learn Apache Maven for Java developers from Udemy, Pluralsight, and other online learning portals.

Hello guys, if you want to learn Maven and looking for the best Maven courses then you have come to the right place. Earlier, I have shared free Maven and Jenkins courses and in this article, I will share the best courses to learn Maven, an essential tool for Java developers.

The Apache Maven or commonly known as just “Maven,” is an essential tool for Java Programmers. It allows you to build your project, manage dependencies, generate documentation, and a lot more.

I can vouch for Maven’s usefulness because I have come from the pre-Maven world of Software development, where you need to manage all the JAR files required by your project. It may seem easy to you that just download the JAR file but it’s not so easy in practice.

For example, you added a new library in your project say Spring framework which also needs log4j but you thought log4j is already there so you didn’t do anything, only to realize that your application is not starting anymore and throwing long and convoluted errors.

This can happen because of version mismatch like Spring needed a higher version of log4j than available in your project.



This is just a tiny bit of an example, which shows how manually managing dependencies can create nightmares. Maven took away all those pain by not only automatically downloading those JAR files for you but also created a central place, known as Maven repository to store those JAR files for better management.



Btw, Maven is not just a dependency management tool, it’s in fact much more than that. The most significant advantage of using Maven is the following convention, which makes software development easy.



In a Maven project, you know where is your source code, where is your test code and where are your resources. You don’t need to spend countless hours going through a large ANT build file to figure out how exactly is your artifact is created.



Because of these useful qualities, the Java ecosystem adopted Maven generously. Most of the open-source project is a Maven project, which makes it easy for developers to understand them and contribute better.

6 Things Java Developers should Know about Maven

If you still have doubts about learning Maven, here is some of the vital information about Maven which will help you to realize it’s valued as the most popular build tools for Java developers:



1. Maven has almost 70% of the market, 20% Gradle, and 10% ANT.



2. A maven is a build tool like make or ANT, take your source code and generate a JAR file, a distributable library. It can also run tests and generate Javadoc when you build your software. It also helps in build-automation. It allows each developer to kick-off the same build to make the same deployable.



3. Maven is also a Dependency management tool — we build an application that requires a third-party library. Maven helps to bring those JAR and keep them up-to-date



4. Maven command-line tool — you can use maven from the command prompt, but you can also use Maven from IDE, also like Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA.



5. Maven as a project management tool — It helps to tell you about what is being used in your project. It can also hold an artifact in a repository like Nexus.



6. Maven provides a standardized approach to building software, a consistent approach like source and test directory, build artifacts as it promotes “Convention over Configuration.”

You can further read my post 10 Maven things Java developer should learn to learn more about Maven and here is a snapshot of the common Maven lifecycle in Java application:

5 Best Maven Courses for Java Developers

Even though Gradle is making inroads, 70% market is still using Maven, and that’s a big enough reason to learn Maven. If you also think so, here are some of the best courses to learn Apache Maven online by yourself.

In this course, you will learn about the Maven Build Lifecycles, how to use Maven to build and package Java projects, understand how to use Maven with popular alternative JVM languages, including Groovy, Kotlin, and Scala, etc.



I am a big fan of John Thompson, having attended his Spring 5 course, Spring 5: Beginner to Guru I have hooked to his teaching style and information delivery.



When I found that John has a Maven course, I immediately bought it even though I know Maven and worked on several Maven projects, including a multi-module Maven project.



Though I wasn’t disappointed, and the course helps me to fill some of the gaps I had in my learning. It’s particularly useful if you are coming with no Maven experience as information density is perfect from a beginner’s perspective.

Here is the link to join this course — Apache Maven: Beginner to Guru

You will also learn to configure Maven to run your unit and integration tests written in JUnit 3, JUnit 4, JUnit 5, TestNG, and Spock framework generate source code from XML and JSON Schemas, and leverage annotation processing at compile time for Project Lombok and Mapstruct.

The course also covers the Apache Maven plugin system and teaches you how plugins are used in the build lifecycle.



Finally, you will also learn to build Spring Boot applications with Apache Maven, learn about the Spring Boot Maven plugin, deploying project artifacts to Maven repositories, and how to develop multi-module Maven projects.

In short, a perfect course to master Maven and ideal for both intermediate and senior Java developers.