I am learning building a Java project in Eclipse using Maven. I created a Java project HelloWorld from
“maven-archetype-quickstart” template in a folder
When you add dependency in pom.xml , do a maven clean , and then maven build , it will add the jars into you project.
You can search dependency artifacts at http://mvnrepository.com/
And if it doesn't add jars it should give you errors which will mean that it is not able to fetch the jar, that could be due to broken repository or connection problems.
Well sometimes if it is one or two jars, better download them and add to build path , but with a lot of dependencies use maven.