Customer Reviews

Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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).

:)

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.

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.

Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook is a great book. While the book does not cover O/R Mapping or Hibernate from ALL angles, but how could it in less than 200 pages? I bought this book hoping to get my feet wet so that I could start working with Hibernate right away and work my way into the rest. That is exactly what this book provides.

The examples in the book are easy to understand, evolve well over the course of the book, and teach useful tips such as configuring Ant to work with Hibernate and how to utilize the mapping techniques. What's more is the author's style is easy to follow and neither to wordy nor too watered down. The book has a good conversational style -- as the title implies developer to developer. Most importantly of all, this book is not intimidating. Instead of wading through 100 pages of introduction, this book gets after the business of learning Hibernate right away! Many technology books try to be everything to everyone and I find myself bored before I get to the meat of the book. That's not a problem with this book.

If I had one to pick on small issue, I would like to have seen the core topics (especially collection mapping techniques) covered in more detail and less time spent on topics like custom types. As I pointed out earlier, my goal was to get a good basis to start working and cover the advanced topics later; Custom types are not something I am ready to "jump" into right away.

At around 150 pages this is not a 'for dummies' book. It's a quick walkthrough of the essential features of Hibernate for those that already understand the basic principles of O/R mapping layers. It starts with installation, then goes quickly into the code in a what/how format. What do I want to do. How is that done. Over and over until all of the essential features of Hibernate are covered.

I like the voicing of the book, which is to treat the reader with respect. I like that there are not a lot of screenshots. And I particularly like the brief but thorough writing style.

I recommend this book to anyone familiar with O/R mapping layers but who needs an introduction to Hibernate.

I am using hibernate for project and was in need of a good book about the subject. Since Hibernate in Action was not published yet, this little book came in handy. It is a great reference source and you will be able to get started with no fuss using this book.

All the fluff has been trimmed out and you will certainly get your money's worth. Although the book has less than 200 pages, it is packed witht the essentials to get you running quickly.

If you have been pondering about an O/R technology, this book will help you make up your mind. All the major topics (from hibernate's ref book) are covered including 1) setup 2) code gen 3)associations/relations augmented 4)query & criteria 5)Enum.

This book is an excellent companion to the online Hibernate's refernence materials.

As an experienced Java programmer, it's refreshing to find a book on a new technology that focuses on the technology and not my Java skills. This book gets a programmer up and running in minutes. I went through the first half of the book (doing all the examples) in about 90 minutes. It'll give you a full Hibernate installation and a good idea of whether or not you need to invest more time in Hibernate.

I co-authored the Java Swing title with Jim Elliott and knew I would enjoy this book. Even so, I'm impressed with its concise nature and I applaud O'Reilly for putting the right price tag on it. It's not the last book you'll ever buy on Hibernate, but it should definitely be your first.

This is the kind of book that will get you on your way to using Hibernate, but you will quickly outgrow it. It is laid out much better than the Hibernate Reference Documentation. After a couple of weeks, you will treat it mostly as a quick reference guide.

Thankfully the book is priced correctly. Too often, a book with this amount of content would still be in the 35-45 price range with a bunch of fluff and filler added in to justify the price. They kept this one short and sweet and chock full of little examples and tip. They kept the appendix fluff to a minimum.

If it was a little more detailed, I'd give it 5 stars. You'll still need the reference doc from Hibernate, but this will get you up and running.

If you are interested in version 2.0 of hibernate, this book works well. If you, however, are interested in learning hibernate 3.0, you will struggle to get anything to work.

Examples:
1. code/ddl generation from mapping xml doesn't work without serious adjustment
2. the session.find command no longer exists (page 48)
3. session.delete(HQL) no longer exists (page 51)

For someone who is trying to learn hibernate, this manual has caused more headaches than it has solved.

This book is very good to get you started with understanding and using Hibernate.

I understand that this book is not meant to cover every aspect of Hibernate but not covering at all optimistic locking, component mapping and inheritance was a bit disapointing.

If you are serious about using Hibernate on a project expect to have to read Hibernate in Action and the reference documentation.

Overall, a good book to get you started and have a few examples that you can refer to when using Hibernate on a project.