Hibernate Quickly [Paperback]

Patrick Peak (Author), Nick Heudecker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 8, 2005

Hibernate Quickly is a companion volume to Manning's Hibernate in Action which is a focused and comprehensive book on the subject written by the project founders. The current book aims to give readers the 20% of information they need 80% of the time. It uses the pages saved to orient the reader within the Hibernate "ecosystem": the peripheral technologies and techniques typically used with Hibernate. This is the book readers are likely to turn to if they want to get up and running quickly. Examples are developed incrementally to demonstrate Hibernate concepts and to show how Hibernate works with the other common development tools and frameworks such as XDoclet, Struts, WebWork, Spring, and Tapestry. Covers the newest version, Hibernate 3.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Patrick Peak is the chief technical officer of BrowserMedia, a Java/J2EE web development and design firm. His focus is on using open source frameworks and tools as a competitive advantage for rapid custom software development. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Product Details

• Paperback: 220 pages
• Publisher: Manning Publications; 1 edition (August 8, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932394419
• ISBN-13: 978-1932394412
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #683,437 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not much quicker than Hibernate in Action, September 22, 2005

By 

Anthony (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hibernate Quickly (Paperback)

I've read both this book and Hibernate in Action, the de facto Hibernate bible. Obviously, the main selling point of Hibernate Quickly is that it's supposed to help you get started with Hibernate faster and less painfully than with other resources or texts.

Unfortunately, I think it falls short. Even just looking at the number of pages in the book, Hibernate Quickly is not much briefer than Hibernate in Action. Some of you may argue that the latter might be more dense, and thus harder to digest. But going beyond book length, I actually think Hibernate in Action is an easier read, for a number of reasons.

First, it does a better job of explaining the reasons or motivations for a feature. Some of you might think this just slows things down, but for me (and I'm sure many others), it accelerates reading and learning.

Related to that issue, Hibernate in Action just flows better. They start simply with a basic example, bring up complications or difficulties surrounding that example, then incrementally introduce the next feature or example, which addresses those problems. The segues are intuitive, concise, and very helpful.

One other issue -- with Hibernate Quickly, I often found myself wondering about some detail surrounding an ORM or Hibernate concept, which I'm sure was excluded in the interest of brevity. I found this made it slower for me to get through the book. I know I have a tendency to get distracted with theoretical details. But I think any intellectually curious developer would also be frustrated by this. You know the feeling: wondering if you shouldn't continue reading forward because your understanding is lacking, or having to consciously suppress these questions as temporarily unimportant details.

With Hibernate in Action, this rarely was the case. If there was a related detail that was excluded, the authors were usually explicit about whether this was deferred to later in the text, or if they addressed it in a previous chapter.

It's clear that the same thoughtfulness used in the design of Hibernate itself was applied to the construction of Hibernate in Action.

On the other hand (and I hate to make this criticism), I don't get that impression with this book. Covering a topic briefly or "quickly" actually takes a lot more work on the part of the author than writing a long text -- assuming it's done well. Condensing and distilling the subject matter takes a lot of time, but the result should be time savings for the reader -- that's how the author usually creates value for most non-theoretical technical books.

But netting it all out, I think I would have "Hibernated quicker" if I just went straight to Hibernate in Action.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars It's a mess, July 18, 2006

By 

Optional "Optional" (DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hibernate Quickly (Paperback)

Chapter 2 in the book is EXCELLENT. Step by step on how to install and setting up and project.

After setting up everything from chapter 2, when you start learning Hibernate, this is what you're going to get:

1. Examples in the book do not match the code

2. The codes aren't complete

3. Authors walk you all over the place. You'll get even more confused after reading this book

4. Sample codes in the book aren't clear

My opinion:

I think the authors wrote this book while doing something else. The ideas are not focus.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great intro to Hibernate, February 27, 2006

By 

C. M. Lowry (Columbia JUG, Columbia, SC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hibernate Quickly (Paperback)

Hibernate has become the most popular ORM framework for Java. This book is a great way to learn what you need to know to get started. The basic prerequisites for getting the most from the book are knowledge of Java and familiarity with relational databases.

In a progressive manner, Hibernate concepts are introduced. The organization of the material in the book is quite good. At the beginning of each chapter, a bullet list of the topics is followed by an overview of the chapter. The chapter goals are listed next. The assumptions made by the authors are also listed. This allows the reader to review a topic if it is required to understand the new material. Good examples (code and xml) accompany the text as well as some graphics to illustrate certain points. The code examples are available on the book web site. Each chapter concludes with a summary section.

The book starts with question "Why Hibernate?" and does a good job explaining the problems that Hibernate is designed to solve. Since Ant and MySQL are used in the examples, a chapter is devoted to introducing them and doing the install. The next four chapters cover the basics of Hibernate, how to work with associations, how to manage collections, and how to query objects persisted with Hibernate. One nice touch is that usually a problem is demonstrated with an example so that it is easier to appreciate the solution.

Since Hibernate is used in conjunction with other tools and frameworks, the next chapters show how to use Spring to organize the DAO, how to use it with three different presentation frameworks, how to use XDoclet to avoid all that xml, and how to unit test with JUnit and DBUnit. Although throughout the text, the differences between Hibernate 2 and Hibernate 3 are highlighted, the final chapter focuses on what is new in Hibernate 3.

While the main focus of the book is on getting developers started with Hibernate, the book could also be useful for developers that may have used some features, but want to enhance their knowledge. I found that the chapters on using Hibernate with Tapestry and Spring very helpful. This book is great way to get started.