I recommend you to try Spring Roo. It lets you start messing around with Spring Framework as you would do with Ruby on Rails or PHP Symfony. You get to learn the most important aspects of spring (routing, security, MVC, ORM, and so on), but you don't need to read a whole manual or try 100 thousand tutorials .
If you are going to give a shot to Roo, you might also be interested in Eclipse STS, which is a very nice (and heavyweight) IDE for Spring Roo.
I would advice you start by understanding the concept of Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control. You can then use any of the above listed tutorials. Also, using maven as a build tool for Spring would make life a whole lot easier for you.