I agree that the user guide is very confusing (compared to the Spring Core user guide at any rate). It doesn't adequately address some very important gotchas that you will run up against in any moderately complex batch scenario.
Important things that you should drill down into as a new starter, and decide your requirements for are,
- configuration of exceptions (when to skip, when to fail, when to retry)
- use of execution context to maintain state (eg when to use step execution context vs job execution context).
- general maintenance of state (use the step scope, especially for input parameters)
It is worth persevering however. Batch programming is very different to other server side styles and greatly benefits from the usual Spring "pattern abstraction" approach.
