Java: How can I start my first big project?

Some time ago, speaking with a friend of mine he asked me a question: "Virtue of your experience, what libraries/tools/technologies can I use to start a new Java project?". This question made me think to my story, in particular to my step by step learning.
Below, the answer I gave to my friend:

I think that, for a beginner developer, open source software is the best choice, specially for the big documentation you can find in the web.
In my humble opinion the first things to learn are:

• Eclipse (I prefer downloading the classic version to install only the needed plugins);

• Maven (and eclipse plugin: m2e);

• Subversion (and eclipse plugin: subclipse, found on the eclipse marketplace).

By integrating these three tools in Eclipse you will have a simple environment for applications development. To learn subversion you can use google code which offers free subversion repository.
Using maven, you can simply import many libraries so I recommend to learn these ones:

• General: Apache Commons Library (in particular commons-lang, commons-io, commons-collections, commons-dbcp);

• General: Google Guava;

• Date/Time: Joda Time;

• Testing: jUnit, Hamcrest matchers, Mockito, H2 or HSQLDB, Spring Test;

• Logging: SLF4J and Logback;

• Spring: spring framework or core.

If you want to build a big application maybe you can find useful these ones:

• Hibernate;

• Spring-Data-JPA.

These are all technologies or libraries that you'll most likely encounter at work.

Finally I recommend the usage of a distributed revision control system, so first learn Mercurial and, only after that, Git, because I think that mercurial is simpler than git but the latter is more powerful. In order to learn how to use these tools you can try googlecode, Bitbucket or GitHub.
In Eclipse I prefer using this eclipse plugin for mercurial and for Git i prefer using SourceTree that can be used for mercurial repositories, too.

That's all what I recommended to my friend, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Related posts:

• Maven pom.xml template for new projects
• State of art of logging in maven project