Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook (Paperback)

by James Elliott (Author)
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Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Do you enjoy writing software, except for the database code? Hibernate:A Developer's Notebook is for you.

Database experts may enjoy fiddling with SQL, but you don't have to--the rest of the application is the fun part. And even database experts dread the tedious plumbing and typographical spaghetti needed to put their SQL into a Java program. Hibernate: A Developers Notebook shows you how to use Hibernate to automate persistence: you write natural Java objects and some simple configuration files, and Hibernate automates all the interaction between your objects and the database. You don't even need to know the database is there, and you can change from one database to another simply by changing a few statements in a configuration file.

Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook walks you through the ins and outs of using Hibernate, from installation and configuration, to complex associations and composite types. Two chapters explore ways to write sophisticated queries, which you can express either through a pure Java API, or with an SQL-inspired, but object-oriented, query language. Don't let that intimidate you though: one of the biggest surprises in working with Hibernate is that for many of the common real-world application scenarios, you don't need an explicit query at all.

If you've needed to add a database backend to your application, don't put it off. It's much more fun than it used to be, and Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook shows you why.

About the new Developer's Notebook Series from O'Reilly:
Developer's Notebooks are a new book series covering important new tools for software developers. Developer's Notebooks stress example over explanation and practice over theory. They are about learning by doing; by experimenting with tools and discovering what works. "All lab, no lecture," with a thoughtful lab partner to guide the way.

About the Author
Elliott is a senior software engineer at Berbee, with over 15 years of professional experience as a systems developer.

Product Details

• Paperback: 190 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. (May 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596006969
• ISBN-13: 978-0596006969
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #153,625 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars NOT for beginners!, August 10, 2005

By	B. morris "a concerned coder..." (cincinnati, OH USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is not intended as a comprehensive/blow-by-blow tutorial. It is a part of o'reilly's new 'notebook' series which is intended as a VERY brief intro to a new technology for experienced developers.

This book is for folks who are pretty experienced with Java and databases, and its intention is to provide a very high-level fast-paced into to hibernate.

In my opinion, it does these things well. I've got about 9 years experience with Java, and about 15 years with SQL/databases, and about 15 years commercial development experience. I've never used hibernate, and I decided to use it in a project. I'm in a HUGE hurry, and I needed to get up to speed FAST. This book got me there. In this sense, I think the book succeeds very well.

There are plenty of spots where I needed additional help, and a quick web search or a quick jump out to hibernates reference documentation (hibernate.org) was all that was required.

This book does what it intends. If you need hand-holding, detailed instructions, or in-depth tutorials, find another book. (And as far as I know, there aren't any).

:)

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good first book on a very cool API, October 28, 2004

By	Riccardo Audano (Chiavari, Italy) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you are familiar with ant, database and sql basics, and of course well versed in Java ,this book is a good way to get your feet wet with Hibernate without a lot of ceremony. At the end of the book you certainly won't be a Hibernate expert but at least you will know enough to start playing with it and decide if you want to go farther. Writing style is concise but clear enough, and gets a little confusing only in the two central chapters on richer associations and enumerated types. Overall I like the dev notebook style, but I think that 50 pages more used for more clarity and examples would have made it perfect.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The BEST first book on Hibernate, July 1, 2004

By	Vinit Carpenter "j2eegeek.com/blog" (Brookfield, WI USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook is the first in the new Developer's Notebook series from O'Reilly. The Developer's Notebook series is a new line of books from O'Reilly that are concise, lab-style guides that have plenty of examples and emphasize practice over theory. For being the first one, O'Reilly has hit a home run with this book.

Hibernate is a lightweight, high performance object/relational persistence and query service for Java. Hibernate allows you to work easily and efficiently with information from a relational database in the form of natural Java objects following common Java idiom - including association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition and the Java collections framework

Written by James Elliott, Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook is an excellent must-own book for anyone interesting in learning more about Hibernate. James does a great job in explaining the topic at hand in a clear and concise manner. All the concepts are explained via examples, which make it easy to follow and learn.

Staring with installation and the setup of your development environment, the book walks you through examples where you build on a small application as you progress through the book learning the subtleties and nuances of Hibernate. This book is extremely readable and is small enough to read cover to cover in a day. My pattern for reading technical books involves reading (or skimming) the book cover to cover before doing a deep dive and working through all the code examples. I found the examples easy to follow and they did a great job in building on the concepts of Hibernate.

I know that Hibernate founder Gavin King and Christian Bauer, a member of the core Hibernate developer team have just finished their new book Hibernate in Action due to ship in August 2004. I am really looking forward to that book and have pre-ordered that book. Having said that, I still highly recommend this O'Reilly book.

I had read a couple of articles on Hibernate and had played with some simple examples but this book gave me all the knowledge and tools to start using Hibernate in a real application. This is a really well written, concise guide to Hibernate and well worth the purchase price. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more about Hibernate and is a great first Hibernate book.