bub hub said
In an age where many technical books are full of typos if not outright misinformation, Hibernate in Action stands out as very well written. It seems that spell-checking has replaced editing for many technical books. This book is not only informational, but easy to comprehend.
The only down side to this book is that it is now somewhat dated in that it does not cover the current release of Hibernate. Nothing on annotations, etc. However, this book is not merely "The Professional Learn Framework X Bible in 23 Days" API memorization aide. Hibernate in Action provides you with the theory of why to use an Object Relational Mapping (ORM) framework and how to best leverage this knowledge. This information is not Hibernate specific and does not lose value with the inevitable new release.
D. Wyss said
A great book for getting going with Hibernate quickly.
Some parts are heavy going because it is packed with info. This pays off because there is little or no padding/rubbish.
Jeremy Stein said
This book is for Hibernate 2. Hibernate 3 is covered by the same authors in Java Persistence with Hibernate
Janet V. Moyer said
I found this book useful and readable, and it helped me develop my first (and second) Hibernate applications. It begins with a brief overview of the kinds of problems which ORM solutions need to address. It then introduces Hibernate along with a couple of examples, upon which subsequent chapters build. (Some reviewers have criticized the examples, but I thought they were useful, and I didn't have trouble following them) One thing you should be aware of: while this book is a good narrative, it's not as useful as a reference. I find myself paging back and forth among several chapters which cover topics in different levels of detail. That shouldn't be a show-stopper since reference material exists on the web. You might be concerned is the book covers Hibernate 2.1, while Hibernate 3.x and Ejb 3 are out; the book is still relevant and valid, and I've used it along side Hibernate 3 with no problem.
Norman Snyder said
With this book, we have the rare circumstance where the founder and principal developer of the technology has authored the material. Moreover, the back jacket promises that the text would build on a single example to show how to use Hibernate in practice.
Sorry, dear reader. This book falls far, far short of its promise. Yes, you can download a single cogent example. But the authors make only loose reference to that example, choosing instead to offer dozens and dozens of snippets, out of context with the example. A first-class book, such as Mastering WebLogic, not only provides a robust example, but also walks the reader entirely through the example, from design choice, through coding practices, and ultimately into implementation decisions. In stark contrast, this book offers nothing more than a progression through various topics, illustrated via pieces of java classes, leaving the reader to hunt for the relevance to the downloadable application.
The book does have its uses. As you dive into various real-world situations, this book should serve, after some digging, to reveal an optimal approach to solving the problem at hand. The topics are covered to a healthy depth. I suspect this is the best treatise available on abstruse topics such as caching, transaction handling, and mapping to legacy data stores.
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