Sushant Kumar

Children grow and develop rapidly in their first five years across the four main areas of development. These areas are motor (physical), language and communication, cognitive and social/emotional.
 
Cognitive development means how children think, explore and figure things out. It is the development of knowledge, skills, problem solving and dispositions, which help children to think about and understand the world around them. Brain development is part of cognitive development.
 
As a parent, it is important to foster your child's cognitive development as soon as he/she is born because doing so provides the foundation for your child's success in school and later in life. For example, research shows that children who can distinguish sounds at six months of age are better at acquiring the skills for learning to read at four and five years of age.
 
To promote your child's cognitive development, it is important that you actively engage in quality interactions on a daily basis. Examples include:

• Talking with your baby and naming commonly used objects.
• Letting your baby explore toys and move about.
• Singing and reading to your baby.
• Exposing your toddler to books and puzzles.
• Expanding on your child's interests in specific learning activities. For example, your toddler might show an early interest in dinosaurs, so you can take him/her on a trip to the natural history museum to learn more about the time that these creatures roamed the earth.
• Answering your child’s “why” questions.

 
Another way that you can foster your child's cognitive development is to provide him/her with choices and prompt him/her to make thoughtful decisions. You should also allow your child to explore different ways of solving problems. While you may want to provide some gentle guidance and encouragement, allow your child some time to figure out things, like a new puzzle. This may require some patience on your part, but it will ultimately help him/her to learn.

I think to directly jump start in Spring and Hibernate would be baffling for a java beginner , if one has really started learning Java. I would suggest the following plan:-
1) Learn java concepts and following packages must be studied in depth --> Read about technology. - java.io; java.utils;java.concurrent
2) Take up jsp and servlets --> Head First JSP and Servlets is good to understand the topic. Learn how different components are wired and how they talk to each other. Topics like db connection, pooling, jndi, session management etc. are important to be understood. Of course, you will also learn HTML and CSS to some extent.
3) Learn some design patterns in conjunction with step 2, like front controller, dispatcher, DAO, Business Delegate,Singleton, Session Facade etc again Head first design pattern is there and of course one can use GOF.
4) Step 2 and 3 seem important to me if one really has to understand and appreciate what Spring promises to provide, and instead of just configuring stuff in xml or just annotating , one can get an insight of why it is really being done in a particular way and basic guiding principle behind it. Topics like Transaction management, Security, Logging are important here. Also , slowly but surely be aware of java meta-programming which makes Spring the framework it is. Some rave on meta-programming from Chris Swan’s web blog Metaprogramming, is a good read. If you are adventurous , this might get you interested in code generation , writing generic parsers etc. god knows what not !!
5) I know it's not that easy, and seems to have a steep learning curve,but it is worth it
6) Hibernate is a different beast altogether and if one has some knowledge of writing SQL and SQL tuning , then it's a good starting point to delve into it. Look up for some online tutorials, to begin with and then probably get a copy of Java persistence with Hibernate by Christian Bauer and Gavin King, to go deeper into hibernate. Topics like associations, fetch strategy, transaction management, connection pooling, caching etc are to look forward to.
7) Try to implement 3-4 projects using spring and hibernate and you will see your knowledge improving. This should also introduce you to Maven.
8) Of course, you will need to read Effective Java and Java Concurrency in Practice side by side.