said
Most of the text in this book is copied from Hibernate in Action, a best-seller in 2004, except some C#2005 example code for Nhibernate 1.2 - an old Nhibernate release. The current Nhibernate release is 2.0, which had been released for six months before this book was published.
me146401 said
Like everyone else, NHiberate 2 out long after this book was finally published. Book would be great if it mentioned or covered anything about Nhiberate 2... but maybe the next book...
said
If you work with NHibernate, are hesitating between several ORM, or are simply curious about how NHibernate works, this book is absolutely necessary.
Indeed, a recurring problem, I believe, with NHibernate, is the difficulty of finding a clear and comprehensive reference... what is now the case with this book.
It reviews not only the configuration and use of the NHibernate framework, but the authors also address the design choices that were made, and an introduction to concepts of architecture.
All this, without dogmatism, without imposing their vision of development, and emphasizing that NHibernate is not a silver bullet.
We will first see a definition of Object/relational mapping, and issues the ORMs seek to solve, then we will see how to configure NHibernate, to map the subject entities, transactions, the caching options, while following the construction of an auction application.
In conclusion, an excellent book, the only drawback (explaining the rating of 4 / 5), is that the book targets the 1.2 version of NHibernate, while version 2.0 was released on August 23. Incompatibilities are few, but it is a pity they are not mentioned in the book. Despite the discrepancy between the two versions, the book remains an investment in my opinion, mandatory for any team working with NHibernate, and for all developers interested in how an ORM works.
ev_yp said
More than a year after the release of NHibernate 1.2, a .Net port of the highly successful and popular Java Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tool mirroring the feature sets of Hibernate 2 and 3, a book providing dedicated coverage of the tool for .Net developers finally gets published! Like the Hibernate In Action book it is based on, this book is divided into three parts: Discovering ORM With NHibernate (Chapters 1-2), NHibernate Deep Dive (Chapters 3-7), and NHibernate in the Real World (Chapters 8-10). Developers unfamiliar with ORM and Hibernate will find the first two parts of the book very useful. Those chapters are very well-written, easy to follow, and provide sufficiently deep technical details. Developers looking for guidance on what to look out for when building NHibernate applications would benefit from discussions on how to handle session management, security, and performance / scalability concerns. Data binding (to web- and windows-forms) strategies are also discussed, but in my opinion, only to a limited extent. Given that NHibernate 1.2 takes advantage of features present only up to .Net 2.0, the book also reads like a somewhat outdated book: for example, how to integrate with .Net's DataSet technology (something that Microsoft is starting to move away from in favor of newer technologies) is discussed, but there is no discussion of potential problem integrating with the newer data binding mechanisms used in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Also, even though NHibernate 2 has been released since September 2008, nothing about it made it into the book.
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