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Hibernate in Action (In Action series)

Format: Paperback
Author: Christian Bauer
ReleaseDate: 01 August, 2004
Publisher: Manning Publications
Rating:

True to the Spirit of "In Action" Series. Comprehensive coverage of Hibernate 2.x.
In the past, many attempts have been made to bridge this gap or replace one with another, but the gap between the two is one of the hard facts of enterprise computing today. Hibernate is an Object/Relational mapping framework that attempts to bridge the gap between Object-Oriented programming model and relational database model. Hibernate is one such attempt that enjoys a lot of success in the community today.

Hibernate in Action, authored by "Christian Bauer" and "Gavin King" (Gavin, being the creator of hibernate), is one of the best books on this topic. Traditionally we have witnessed that the best book on a particular technology is not written by the creator of the technology themselves, but by authors who have the proficiency to explain it pragmatically. Gavin, breaks the shackles and contributes the best book for the technology he created.

The primary target audience is java developers who work with SQL based database systems and have struggled hard to bridge the gap themselves.

The book starts by explaining what "Object/Relational paradigm mismatch" is all about. The authors weigh this to be the prime motivation for any ORM implementation, and wish that the users understand this mismatch, before they jump-in believing that ORM is the magic bullet for all their problems.

The chapters "Introducing and Integrating hibernate", "Mapping persistent classes", "Working with persistent objects" and "Transactions, concurrency, and caching" introduces the basics for various aspects of hibernate. These chapters are the most beneficial part of the book and well exceed the book's cost.

The chapters "Advanced mapping concepts", "Retrieving objects efficiently", "Writing hibernate applications" and "Using the toolset" focus on the advanced concepts. These chapters are rather dry and are mostly useful for reference purposes only. So, if you get lost while reading these chapters, don't worry. It covers so many advanced concepts that not everything will fit into one's head in the first pass. If you frequently visit this section for reference while developing hibernate applications, you will start to appreciate this section slowly but steadily.

In my opinion, if you want just one book to learn and use hibernate for your next project, look no further.

But, don't forget, the next edition is just round the corner. It covers Hibernate 3. x and also includes full coverage of the EJB 3. 0's sub specification called Java Persistence API (JPA). So, if you are not in any urgency, then you might want to wait, otherwise, go ahead and get this one for your bookshelf as soon as you can. You won't regret it. .

Great for Hibernate, and pretty good for NHibernate too.
A good chunk of the book won't be useful to you if you're looking to use it with NHibernate, but the rest is relevent. Great book about Hibernate.

Solid Description WIth Excellent Examples
The coverage of Hiberate is extremely well organized. Buy this book if you want to get an excellent in-depth understanding of Hibernate. I found myself quickly reading the book from cover to cover. Once I began real development work with NHibernate I found myself continually returning to use the book as a reference. Both the Table of Contents and the Index are very well organized; this reduced the time it took to find critical information during development. A few implementation details are different for NHibernate but they are all described on the NHibernate web site. .