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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
How Awful Can A Book really Be? An Awful Book for Learning, October 2, 2007
This review is from: Beginning Hibernate: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: from Novice to Professional) (Paperback)
I just can't tell you how frustrated I am at trying to learn Hibernate with this useless book.
I mean, I'm a patient guy, and I know technology well, but trying to learn from this book is brutal.
The examples are all over the place. In chapter 6, you get into annotations, and they've got this huge example with all these tables and garbage. All i want to know is how to do a simple one-to-many mapping between two tables - that's it! But instead, I get five classes with many to one, one to many, many to many, and all this other stuff that obfuscates the point so much, it's not even worth it.
And what's more, they deal with all this code and table references, but there's no ERD diagram to be found. I mean, where is it? I'm jumping from code to annotations to create SQL scripts - I want a simple ERD diagram to show me what's connecting where.
And this book makes no effort to explain. I loved this sentence "The mappedBy attribute is mandatory." Ok, could you maybe tell me what it means, what it does, or what it represents? Is that too much to ask.
Plus, simple stuff is just missing. A simple one-to-one relationship with xml is never demonstrated - just a pathetic description of the xml entry that doesn't describe at all how to do a mapping.
Plus, the book shoots page after page of definitions that look like it was pulled directy from the documentation, but no examples of how to use them in your code - just filler.
I really hate this book. The authors may know Hibernate, but they know nothing about teaching or helping someone understand a technology. I'm shoving this book in the garbage.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A bad name for a really good book, January 29, 2008
This review is from: Beginning Hibernate: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: from Novice to Professional) (Paperback)
I found this book to be really well organized and methodical, starting with the basics of Hibernate and working up to more complex aspects and features in a gradual, measured fashion. My only prior exposure to a book on Hibernate was Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook; it was short and sweet, and of necessity was kind of lightweight, not sufficient for really getting into Hibernate deeply. I looked at Java Persistence with Hibernate but found it kind of baroque. Although that seems to be the most popular book on the subject, I found its approach not especially conducive to learning the subject matter.
My background is that I am an experienced Java/J2EE programmer with a strong database background. My organization has been making use of Hibernate but others in my group have been the ones really blazing the trails. So I'd been exposed to Hibernate usage, I could "get" a good portion of what's going on under the hood, but I required better and deeper understanding if I wanted to work more intimately with our lower-level "DAO" code.
Most complaints I'm seeing here seem to be saying that this book is not for beginners. First, I would question what kind of "beginners" we are talking about--would a novice Web designer who can use design tools but doesn't know HTML, or a PHP programmer who doesn't know Java or J2EE or enterprise design patterns, find this book useful and readable? I don't think so. So I would have to agree, this is not a book for that kind of "beginner".
But this is an indictment of the title, not of the book itself. This IS a book that starts at the beginning and works its way up to rather advanced stuff in what I thought was a well-organized manner. The material in later chapters requires background and experience with other aspects of Java and database technology, including understanding of annotations, abstract query language concepts, etc.
For a lighter-weight introduction to Hibernate I might recommend Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook, but if you are really looking to get into the trenches and dig deep, I found this book to be excellent. I've been told that other APress books named "Beginning XXXXX" are mis-titled, that the "Beginning" title really isn't appropriate and really doesn't do the book(s) justice. So be aware that these are books that start at the "beginning" but that doesn't mean they're necessarily appropriate for total neophytes in related technologies.
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17 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THE BEST YET, October 28, 2006
This review is from: Beginning Hibernate: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: from Novice to Professional) (Paperback)
I bought Hibernate in Action a few months ago (claims to be the Hibernate Bible by some folks). Well it's a good book, but many details and tricky stuff were left out. I had some problems finding useful information from that book.
Beginning Hibernate offers MANY MANY more tips. Its written style is consice and to the point. I actually found 2 solutions to the problems I encountered on my first Hibernate project. Very clear explanation on association, class mappings, HQL and Annotations. Definitely recommended to beginners (such as me) and veterans!
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