Professional Hibernate (Programmer to Programmer)

Rating:
Summary: (Un)Professional Hibernate ?!
Review: Hello Hibernate community!

Having heard much about the benefits to use Hibernate 2.x (now even being considered to deliver the EJB3 persistence layer), I wanted to learn how to apply this technology for my company's mission critical Java applications. Therefore, the title Professional Hibernate (Programmer to Programmer) sounds appropriate.

But unfortunately, the book is missing the goal to tell you how to use Hibernate to access RDBs in a professional way.

Real programmer's problems are not discussed in a way leading to working Java/Hibernate programs in a professional environment, at least not when using MS SQL Server 2000. Even worse, the demo code associated to the book just leads to many runtime exceptions. (The system architecture around CDTest.java helps you to learn how NOT to design it for multiuser access!)

After a nasty week and weekend, I'd now like to recommend to all Amazon customers to buy the book "Hibernate in Action", instead. This book has lead me to a deep understanding of the issues to develop missing critical applications using the indeed cool RDB wrapper Hibernate - and the code just works!

Dirk V. Schesmer
Stuttgart/Germany

Rating:
Summary: Terrible ! Do the authors know JAVA ?
Review: I fully agree with the other reviewers. Unfortunately, I bought the book before I checked the comments out here.

This is a book which does appear to be good - lots of code examples and all that. But it all comes to naught when the code is fraught with errors. And such terrible errors that I wonder whether the authors know Java at all.

Here is a code snippet they have used to illustarte binary data being saved in Hibernate:

public class Someclass {
....
Blob blob;
...

public void setBlob(bytes[] b) {
this.blob = b;
}
...
}


Now I ask you - is this code ever going to compile ? If binary data setting was so easy, we wouldnt have so many web-sites dealing with how to save Blobs into the database.

There are typos and code errors galore. My advice - stay away from this book !

I hear "Hibernate in Action" is much better and it has been well reviewed by folks at theserverside.com. So I should think that that should be a better option.

Rating:
Summary: Unprofessional Hibernate
Review: I'd actually give this book 0 stars if I could.

I have never purchased such a bad technical book in 16 years of spending my money on these things. This book is full of coding errors, explanation errors, and typographical errors. The authors fail to point out very important information needed to get their examples working. The downloadable examples are organized in folders for the wrong chapters. The examples don't work when applied to configurations described in the text. The litany of problems goes on and on.

The fact the book mentions no technical reviewers should have tipped me off.

The supporting Web page at Wrox has no errata entries, even though the book has hundreds of mistakes. The forum on the book is dead. If you want to post errata you have to register, and then when you do it rejects your login. Perhaps that accounts for no errata.

I'd say the authors have no interest in maintaining such a list themselves, or else have moved on to other hobbies. As a Java developer I'd strongly recommend anyone contemplating this book moves on and buys another book instead. I'd recommend the book by Will Iverson ("Hibernate : A J2EE Developer's Guide") or "Hibernate in Action" by Christian Bauer, Gavin King instead.

The only positive thing I could say for the book is that it will force you do a lot of hunting down of answers to help you get through all the problems that working through their examples will give you. Having to fix a problem is often the best way to understand the details of a tool, API, or issue. But as a way of learning a technology I'd not recommend it. Most developers have enough of such frustrations in their day to day job to deal with already.

Rating:
Summary: The worst technical book I've ever seen
Review: Professional Hibernate is by far the worst technical book I've ever seen. There are glaring typos and grammatical errors on every page. Further, the code samples are extremely basic. The authors made no effort to teach the readers how to develop real applications. And the code would never even work! Very few examples would actually compile because there are glaring basic errors that any entry level programmer should know.

Don't waste your money on this book!

Rating:
Summary: unbelievably shoddy
Review: The worst edited code samples I've ever seen. It looks like they printed out listings, OCR'd them, and published the result without even a cursory glance. I'm taking my copy back.

Rating:
Summary: Mistakes galore and nothing to offer over the docs
Review: There are way too many mistakes in this book - technical and grammatical. When reading this book I was learning nothing more than what I had learned the day before, using the hibernate docs. Tell a lie, I did learn a little about Aspectj, Maven and a whole bunch of other things I had no interest in - about a third of this already skinny book had barely anything to do with Hibernate.

Ask yourself this before buying this book - do you trust the authors, java programmers, that believe a String object is a primitive? That think 'void'declared methods will return an Object? That think you use the syntax 'O' to pass arguments and not (). That believe there is a collection class called 'list' and not List? That think that ......... well, you get my point. Most of the code in this book would NOT compile and has clearly not been tested. Many of the msitakes are not one-off glitches, but are persisted throughout the book - it is really really anoyying!

Do what I did, print out the hibernate docs. Dont do the other thing I did, buy this book. My next try will be 'Hibernate In Action' - not sure yet if its any good.



Rating:
Summary: great perspective on hibernate
Review: This book covers the basics really well, but it is no replacement for the docs. However it complements the docs very nicely with a totally fresh perspective on developing with Hibernate. The docs contain clear and concise directions for using Hibernate in its most common configurations. This book also covers the basics of Hibernate, but from the perspective of building working applications. The authors demonstrate how to build at least three applications in this book, and each one makes use of a different set of Hibernate features and functions. The code itself is not commented, but the surrounding text does an excellent job of explaining it, and all the code worked for me with little effort. The code supports many different databases (mysql, postgresql, and db2, etc).

The other aspect of the book's perspective that I appreciated is its focus on using Hibernate with other tools. The authors have obviously done a lot of Hibernate development in production situations. They explain how to integrate Hibernate with tomcat, xdoclet, maven, eclipse, and other common tools. They also discuss more esoteric tools (at least from my perspective) including design patterns and AspectJ.

This book did a lot to move me from playing with Hibernate to using it in my development work.

Rating:
Summary: Very in-depth, but terse and code heavy
Review: This is a well written and illustrated book that guides you through the entire Hibernate O/R mapping landscape. The chapters are short. The text is fairly terse. And the author relies heavily on code to do the talking. It's fine if you like learning that way. For those who want a gentler approach I would recommend Manning's Hibernate in Action.

Rating:
Summary: don't waste your money for this book...
Review: this is an easy read book... but with the number of typo and errors in code... you really have to consult the reference manual from time to time...

e.g. in chapter4, page 74, it explains hilo generator that relies on the table hibernate_unique_key with column next_hi but the book says it relies on hibernate-unique-key with column next-value... how inaccurate is this?

this is just another bad example of wrox book... it's unfinished book as far as i'm concerned...

Rating:
Summary: Good thing my company paid for this...
Review: Well plain and simple folks... those who gave more than 1 star were PAID to give this book a rate it didn't deserve.

How bad it is, you would ask. Well let us say reaching page 7 I had to go to Amazon to see what other people say about this book. For a moment I thought I had lost 100% of my programming IQ for drinking too much tea. I cannot continue a page more. That is how bad it is. I think the authors are .net programmers and were just asked to write a book on hibernate.

If you really really hate someone, recommend this book. But if you value your hard earned money, stay away from this one. Don't let the Editorial Reviews misguide you. I think the "editors" never actually read it.

Listen to us; we poor people who actually bought and read Professional Hibernate.