Hibernate in Action (In Action series)

Rating:
Summary: A valuable resource to creating Hibernate applications!
Review: As a Hibernate/Spring developer the last 5 months, I have found this book as an impeccable resource for creating Hibernate applications. Many best practices helped me code my application the "right" way and with limited snags. Good coverage on the theory as well as the practical aspects. Also, great snippets on how and why Hibernate does what it does which can be frustrating for a novice Hibernate programmer without this information. Christian has been quick to answer most questions I have posed to him regarding some ambiguities or questions I had.

The only reason for my 4 star rating is that the examples were somewhat run-of-the-mill. Understandibly, but I wish I saw some more for different situations, particularily SOA type solutions where Hibernate VOs have to be serialized, which brings up a whole host of issues. Also, this book is not the only resource that is of value - the reference documentation + this book + curt Hibernate forum responses ;o) = hibernate solution of goodness!

Rating:
Summary: Better than nothing but not great
Review: As a previous reviewer mentioned the first 3 chapters of the book are great. My primary complaint with this book is that the authors didn't focus on what was important. The sections on the actual mapping of the objects to the database are not very good, and mapping isn't even really discussed at all until chapter 6. Instead the authors chose to use chapter 5 for a windy discourse on caching and ACID. Two topics that you really can't give a damn about if you can't map your objects. To me having a chapter about that stuff before you even deal with mapping is absolutely backwards.

On a side note:

The authors do a good job of explaining why one-to-one relationships are still mapped as many-to-one relationships (just with a unique constraint). Unfortunately, XDoclet does not recognize what you are trying to do when this occurs and insists on creating a property element for the method anyway. If you are following good design principles and returning interfaces from your methods instead of classes, XDoclet generates the unwanted property element with the CLASS ATTRIBUTE SET TO THE INTERFACE! This of course is not right and causes Hibernate to throw MappingExceptions at configuration time.

So XDoclet is useless for generating one-to-one relationships, making it completely useless for generating Hibernate mappings. Fortunately editing files by hand is a lot easier with Hibernate than with CMP and XDoclet won't overwrite a file that was edited by hand.

Rating:
Summary: Good for a first edition
Review: Hibernate is an exciting new technology. This book written by the Hibernate Development Team Leaders explores simple and complex situations you will find when working with new or existing databases. I have found it very useful. However there are some observations:

As it is a first edition, there are several errata that may misguide the new user (It did it to me!) Be sure to mark them in your book before reading it (you can find them in the Hibernate website).

Complement your learning with the online Hibernate Reference. Also take a look to the Hibernate forums whenever you have questions.

There are some areas where the book could have been a little bit more explanative i.e. mapping composite keys, mapping for existing databases, common problems found with existing databases, common errors while mapping, possible origin of error messages, etc. However in general I have to give it a good rating as it definitely helped me. I am sure the next edition will show a big improvement.

Rating:
Summary: Good if you're about to start a new project
Review: Hibernate is arguably one of the most interesting and useful Open Source projects around. If you develop enterprise Java applications that have to do with a relational database (and which one doesn't?), then you should seriously consider using an Object/Relational Mapping (ORM for short) tool as an alternative to straight JDBC, in particular if you have a rich domain model and you'd like to exploit the object-oriented features of the language, like polymorphism, and core libraries like the Collections API.

This book comes straight from the source. Gavin is actually the founder of the project and Christian is one of the most prominent developers. It is not surprising, therefore, that the book explains some of the design decisions that have shaped Hibernate into what it is now, like using runtime bytecode generation in preference to source code generation or post-compilation bytecode manipulation.

Hibernate is not easy to learn and use proficiently if you're not prepared to study it thouroughly and this book does a good job of explaining tricky subjects like the persistent objects' lifecycle, exotic mappings, transactions and so on. However, it would be quite hard to use it as a single reference source while working with Hibernate. You should be prepared to refer constantly to the reference documentation, the API docs and the huge knowledge base available through the online forums.

At a little more than 400 pages, it is not a particularly thin book, yet I would have appreciated a more systematic treatment of the APIs and the different types of mappings, with more code samples. As it is, you'll find it a very useful and interesting book if you're about to start a new project and want to know whether Hibernate is the right solution to your persistence problems. If you're a developer interested in using Hibernate, I suggest giving it as a present to your technical mamanger or team leader. In this case, I'd give it five stars

On the other hand, if you're already experienced with Hibernate, it is much less useful but nonetheless very iteresting and well-written, so I'd give it four stars.

Rating:
Summary: I doubt Amazon will print this but...
Review: I felt I should balance out the 2 star rating left by Dean Hiller, who really liked the book but gave it 2 stars because, to paraphrase in his own words, "he is anal". People look seriously at reviews, and the number of stars given is important. I see 4 or less, I probabably don't buy the book. If you don't want to help people in their decision making, then keep your mouth shut. You should rate book with respect to alternatives, not according to your own bizarre personal psychology.

Rating:
Summary: Hibernate not much in action
Review: I read this book after a rought time dealing with theprofesional hibernate book. I gave 'Profesional Hibernate'a lousy review - mostly based on the amount of typos and innaccurate technical references when decribing the java language.

This book wasa little better - though again, not quite meaty enough for my liking. And not at all 'in action' - at least not real world action.

This book would do you well as an introduction to hibernate and, byu the looks of it, is about as good as it gets with Hibernate books.

Be careful how much faith you put in these reviews - I know that the authors of these partcular books are posting against each other in a very unprofessional way.


Rating:
Summary: A book that is "for by and of" for hibernate developer's
Review: I would strongly recomend Hibernate in Action - the book for Hibernate developers. The step by step contents were handy.
I am also working on some contribution to the Hibernate community.
Very inspirational book in my 4 years of opensource community involvment.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent starting guide
Review: In full and fair disclosure, I know the authors, so my review may have little weight for many. But for what it's worth, I found this book to a very well written technical book. Part philosophical, part how-to, it's afforded me a great introduction to persistence. I hope the die-hard users out there get much more out of it than I have. The book covered a lot of ground including mapping persistent classes; using transactions, concurrency, and caching; and ; working with persistent objects; even something as advanced tools as Middlegen. Overall, a great intro to a really useful open source tool.

I'd also like to iterate Frank Kalish's comment below (thank you): I hope the Dean Hillers and Andles of Perth, Australia (one and the same?) would be more careful with their comments. I did not find Andles' comment suggesting the Gavin and Christian are on Amazon pumping up the reviews particularly enlightening. If you know either of them, you'd know neither has the time to be fussy over how well their book is doing on Amazon. How did Hibernate become so successful? Because Gavin spent three years of his life carrying on a full-time job and working on Hibernate in his spare time. As a friend, I'm just sticking up for him against groundless accusations that other Amazon customers may take seriously.

Rating:
Summary: Focused walk through the essentials
Review: It's nice to find a book that sticks dead on topic and provides a thorough walkthrough. This is that kind of book. It's relatively short. There is a brief introduction to the basics of the O/R mapping problem. Then it's straight into the heart of Hibernate. It starts by discussing persistent objects, then transactions, then into a fine section on performance, and finally a section of code generation as it's applied to Hibernate.

The coverage is a little terse. Graphics are used effectively but not overused. This is not a for dummies book. It's for programmers who know their stuff and want a professional walkthrough of Hibernate architecture and implementation.

Rating:
Summary: It's one piece of the puzzle
Review: While I'm no hibernate expert I can say that my current project has exposed me to just about every normal scenario described in this book. The title says "in action" and I can say in most normal cases, when you are actually working with Hibernate, you will see the samples in this book. I rated this book a 4 because I see this book as part of a set of necessary books you should add to your library. Book #1: this book, Book #2: Hibernate: A developer's notebook by James Elliott, it provides the step-by-steps of creating a hibernate enabled application, Book #3 (which is actually a free reference) The Hibernate Reference on the Hibernate web site.