Customer Reviews

Beginning Hibernate: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: from Novice to Professional)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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!

New to Hibernate, I started with the advanced "Java Persistence with Hibernate". It was such a painful experience that I decided to look for a better introduction and chose "Beginning Hibernate". Our two year old project is already using Hibernate, and now I have to deal with it when fixing bugs and/or adding new features. Hibernate has been a huge source of problems on this project because the people who knew how to use it didn't do it right and now have left. Perhaps Hibernate also shares some of the blame as it is a technology that doesn't seem to support quick ramp up (which is a sign of complexity).

Although "Beginning Hibernate" is not perfect, it does introduce concepts in an easy and smooth way which is exactly what I needed. I now feel as if I have the foundation to maintain the existing Hibernate code in our project. I still have ways to grow with this technology, and maybe now with this book under my belt I'll be able to tackle "Java Persistence with Hibernate".

As typical with my experience with Apress, I couldn't find a published errata on-line. This is important with technical books, in my opinion, since this is a precise technology. On the plus side, this book did impress me with their appendix of goodies that are very real-world oriented.

The jury is still out for me if Hibernate is a technology worth using on projects due to all the trouble it brings with it, but what is clear to me is that if you need to get ramped up, do yourself a favor and start with this book. Rating 3.5/5 stars (rounded up).

It looks like an overall a gentle and easy to read and digest, example driven intro to the Hibernate APIs but has some major flaws like introducing a DAO pattern in the very first example. This useful practice in this case just obscures and hides the APIs to the beginner. Also, the section on XML mapping is absolutely unreadable, being just a rumination on the DTD. I would have loved to see a "fatter" book with many more examples, especially with mapping relationships , transactions and caching. One pleasant surprise was a good discussion of locking. In conclusion this book is not "meaty" enough to grow your Hibernate muscles, so even if you don't feel ready to wrestle with the way heavyweight Manning book "Java persistence with Hibernate"... I would still take a brave step and start there as this book will just be a waste of time. Unfortunately , as of today, no decent gentle introduction exists for Hibernate. My general advice is STAY FAR from this book's authors.. they are constantly and stubbornly producing horrible books about subjects they don't know enough about, and promise to be doing that for quite some time...

Most APress books seem to be well done. Sadly, this book is poorly organized and poorly written. There is only one example program in the book and it does not compile due incorrect instructions and code omissions. You can fix the errors without too much trouble and compile the project, but the example is too simple to use in your work. The rest of the book outlines (without runnable examples) other aspects of the Hibernate api, but a programmer is going to want complete example applications that run in order to get a good feel of how all the parts fit together and work together.

A better choice, if you need to learn the basics of Hibernate is the web tutorial given on the Hibernate web site. The tutorial is free and, unlike the book example, it works! The tutorial on the Hibernate site is well written and clear.

This book is a good book on Hibernate, but not for the complete beginner, ss the title suggests.

The book moves quickly into advanced topics, introducing DAOs a little too early for a beginner, as another review has said. I think a total beginner might be frustrated with this book, or so some have complained. I think this book is more focussed on people who are beginning Hibernate, but have a good deal of experience working with other databases or database frameworks.

If you're used Toplink, worked heavily with DAOs, did alot of CMP mapping, or have a good deal of JDBC or database programming experience, then this is the right book for you to pick up in order to jump into Hibernate. It's a perfect fit for that type of professional. For someone a little less familiar with database persistence technologies, Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook, or Hibernate Made Easy: Simplified Data Persistence with Hibernate and JPA (Java Persistence API) Annotations might be a better fit.

I bought this book before Java Persistence with Hibernate ( the newer Version of Hibernate in Action ) and to be quite honest was put off by its style of organizing things. It is recommended only if you cannot somehow refer to Hibernate's reference Manual. Somehow i personally found that examples weren't just enough to do the kind of justice you'd like from a book that will make you a " professional ".

I agree with the other comment made about association mapping explaination too. In my opinion if you want a gentle introduction to Hibernate, take Hibernate in Action ( Don't buy New Version called Java Persistence with Hibernate, if you want to learn Hibernate real quick ). After you gotten through initial hurdles use Java Persistence with Hibernate, its the best book that is out there and will explain things in a Much Much better way believe me.

This is from a Person who is actually working in a Hibernate Project.

Regards
Vyas, Anirudh

This book takes a simple concept and makes it hard to learn.

For a beginning Hibernate book, you want some examples that are easy and straight forward, not needlessly complex and overcomplicated. Plus, the book doesn't know what it wants to be, jumping from mapping files to annotations to whatever.

This is not the first time I've been disappointed with this publisher. I'm just not happy with these yellow and black books.

I've give this book approximately 4 hours of my time and that was simply struggling to get my current Linux workstation configured with all of the miscellaneous jar files that this book requires.

Problems:

The download example file, once unzipped has no organization regarding the directory structure matching chapter names. Every solid programming book I've ever rated highly has always had an example directory structure matching the chapter numbers, i.e. All examples in Chapter 1 are in a directory named, "chapter1", and so on. This book doesn't do that.

OK, so you've somehow overcome Problem 1 and found the directory path for the first program in the book. You dutifully follow all directions, downloading all required jar files and making changes to any necessary XML files. This took a remarkable amount of time, but I told myself it would be worth it to get to the prize, a successfully compiled and working example program. Alas, it was not to be. Even though I had followed all instructions to the letter I received this error and other similar errors:

compile:

populateMessages:
[java] SLF4J: The requested version 1.5.11 by your slf4j binding is not compatible with [1.5.5, 1.5.6, 1.5.7, 1.5.8]
[java] SLF4J: See [...] for further details.

So you read the problem description and you solve that one and continue on. I must have had 2 or 3 of these errors. At this point, into my 4th hour, I had to make a determination. Do I continue on, wasting time given the fact that there will probably be more of the same, or do I look for another book that has what I consider to be the number one distinguishing criteria for a solid programming book: examples that work!

I decided to continue looking. Thankfully I did not buy this book. I subscribe to O'Reilly's books online, so the worst part is that it occupies one slot in my bookshelf for 30 days.

Buyer beware!