NHibernate in Action (Paperback)

by Pierre Henri Kuaté (Author), Christian Bauer (Author), Gavin King (Author), Tobin Harris (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
In the classic style of Manning's "In Action" series, NHibernate in Action shows .NET developers how to use the NHibernate Object/Relational Mapping tool. This book is a translation from Java to .NET, as well as an expansion, of Manning's bestselling Hibernate in Action. All traces of Java have been carefully replaced by their .NET equivalents. The book shows how to implement complex business objects, and later teaches advanced techniques like caching and session management. Readers will discover how to implement persistence in a .NET application, and how to configure NHibernate to specify the mapping information between business objects and database tables. Readers will also be introduced to the internal architecture of NHibernate by progressively building a complete sample application using Agile methodologies.

About the Author
Pierre Henri Kuate is one of the main developers on the NHibernate project team and is a major contributor to the NHibernate forum. He's responsible for managing the NHivbernate documentation, web site and forum on the Hibernate.org site. He started using NHibernate more than two years ago in commercial development.

Tobin Harris has worked with NHibernate since it was in early Beta. His passion is tools and practices that help build quality software at high speeds. As an independent consultant and entrepreneur, Tobin works with companies across the globe in various sectors including banking, personal finance, healthcare, software components and new media. In 2001, Tobin was the founder of the Open Source SqlBuddy project. Subsequently he has worked in partnership with Frost Innovation on Gaia Ajax Widgets, an Open Source Ajax suite for .NET. Tobin obtained his degree in Software Engineering at Leeds Metropolitan University, and continues to work and live in Leeds, UK.

Christian Bauer is a member of the Hibernate developer team and a trainer, consultant, and product manager for Hibernate, EJB 3.0, and JBoss Seam at JBoss. He is the lead author of Hibernate in Action and Java Persistence with Hibernate.

The second coauthor, Gavin King, is a lead developer at JBoss, the creator of Hibernate and a member of the EJB 3.0 (JSR 220) expert group. He also leads the Web Beans JSR 299, a standardization effort involving Hibernate concepts, JSF, and EJB 3.0.

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Manning Publications (February 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932394923
• ISBN-13: 978-1932394924
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #24,256 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Technically deep, but only covers older 1.2 version and integration with .Net 1.x or 2.x, nothing specific to 3.x, March 1, 2009

By	Techie Evan - See all my reviews

More than a year after the release of NHibernate 1.2, a .Net port of the highly successful and popular Java Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tool mirroring the feature sets of Hibernate 2 and 3, a book providing dedicated coverage of the tool for .Net developers finally gets published! Like the Hibernate In Action book it is based on, this book is divided into three parts: Discovering ORM With NHibernate (Chapters 1-2), NHibernate Deep Dive (Chapters 3-7), and NHibernate in the Real World (Chapters 8-10). Developers unfamiliar with ORM and Hibernate will find the first two parts of the book very useful. Those chapters are very well-written, easy to follow, and provide sufficiently deep technical details. Developers looking for guidance on what to look out for when building NHibernate applications would benefit from discussions on how to handle session management, security, and performance / scalability concerns. Data binding (to web- and windows-forms) strategies are also discussed, but in my opinion, only to a limited extent. Given that NHibernate 1.2 takes advantage of features present only up to .Net 2.0, the book also reads like a somewhat outdated book: for example, how to integrate with .Net's DataSet technology (something that Microsoft is starting to move away from in favor of newer technologies) is discussed, but there is no discussion of potential problem integrating with the newer data binding mechanisms used in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Also, even though NHibernate 2 has been released since September 2008, nothing about it made it into the book.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The NHibernate Bible, July 5, 2009

By	Jess Chadwick "Microsoft MVP, ASP.NET" (Ewing, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'd argue that this book may be more appropriately naming something along the lines of "ORM in Action (with a focus on NHibernate)" because it is not only a bible for understanding and using NHibernate, but for ORM concepts in general! The authors skillfully intertwine detailed and insightful discussion of general database, ORM, and enterprise development concepts with the nitty-gritty implementation details of NHibernate, all in an easy-to-read manner. Beginning with a tour of many of the various ORM (and ORM-ish) solutions available to .NET developers and ending with a few chapters dedicated to discussing best practices of enterprise application development, this is a very well-rounded book that is easily digested by developers of pretty much any skill level. I knew only high-level details about NHibernate and had a few mis-guided attempts at implementing it by myself prior to reading this book, but now I feel incredibly confident that I will be able to create plenty of NHibernate-driven applications with ease. Another great benefit is the comfort I get from knowing that when I hit any more snafus in the future, it is obviously that this book will be there as a solid reference to help get me through.

The cons? Yeah, I agree with many of the other comments/reviews when they say that it'd be nice if the book discussed NHibernate 2 & .NET 3.x functionality (like LINQ-to-NHibernate), but I think those expectations are somewhat unrealistic. Because of its open source nature, NHibernate is a living organism with stark contrast to a published book. Due to this contrast, I am more interested in a text that can explain the fundamental concepts than an incredibly in-depth (and quickly obsolete!) explanation of the technical implementation of those concepts.

When it comes down to it, this is a great book that delivers on its promises and provides a comprehensive look at NHibernate in Action and how you can get it working for you. I'm just gonna come right out and say it - this is the NHibernate Bible.

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book, July 5, 2009

By	RK (TX, USA) - See all my reviews

This is an awesome book. I now realize that nHibernate is not just about mapping files. I also learned about the lifecycle of the nHibernate Session itself and how to tie that to a asp.net session and how you can layer a ORM solution within an MVC framework. A must read for anyone trying to understand Object/Relational mapping and separation of concerns.

It first lays out all the mapping features (about .hbm files)in great detail. I feel that the chapter on Real world applications (chapter 8) must have come much earlier in the book. Reading about every feature of nHibernate was tiresome, until I figured out I really don't need all this for the time being and jumped to the end where it talks about integrating with asp.net, databinding, DAO etc.

Overall its a good book.