One of my secrets is to load reading material onto a tablet and then read it while doing cardio at the gym. This is very good for things for which book learning is effective.
If you want to use, say, maven or spring, you will completely destroy yourself by looking up answers on stackoverflow or google and not understanding how the system works. If your team does it for a few years they will be up sh1t creek and have to pay somebody like me $200 an hour.
Read the manual from end to end a few times and then do it again and you will find systems like this are not so bad when you understand them.
