Customer Reviews

Pro Hibernate 3 (Expert's Voice)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The good stuff:

* Clear and consistent.
* Very few errors (spotted just a couple, minor ones).
* Good typography.
* The authors know their stuff, and it shows.

The not so good stuff:

At 242 pages, this book is too thin. No, let me restate it: it is way too thin. I'm not particularly fond of very thick books, but when the subject matter is complex, you simply can't get away with a cursory glance at its intricacies. You see, at 408 pages, I still think that Hibernate in Action, though it is probably the best book on the subject, would be just great if it packed a few more pages.

The problem with Hibernate is that beneath its apparent simplicity lie a large number of difficult problems. Don't get me wrong, I still think Hibernate is the best ORM tool out there. Unfortunately, Object-Relational Mapping is a hard problem. Solving the Object-Relational impedance mismatch in a fully transparent way is probably impossible: all proposed solutions so far are, in the end, yet another abstraction layer. And as we all know, all abstractions leak, one way or the other.

If you are just beginning to approach Hibernate and think that you will get a decent coverage of the complexities, traps and pitfalls of a tool like Hibernate in just 242 pages, you're bound to be disappointed. Here are just a few subjects that I would have liked to see covered much more deeply:

* HQL syntax. The official Hibernate documentation already gives some more complex samples, but their explanation is too concise. A good complement to the docs should probably clarify what you can and what you cannot do in HQL.
* Exotic mappings.
* Tuning and optimization.
* Caching. What are the benefits and drawbacks of the various caching strategies and implementations?
* Lazy loading. It is my experience that novices sooner or later will get the dreaded LazyInitializationException. What techniques can be used to avoid it?
* Cascading rules and their effect on the lifecycle of entities.
* Bulk loading and saving.
* Using versioning to implement optimistic locking.
* Others that I don't remember at the moment.

All in all, I don't think this is a bad book. Quite the contrary. It's just that I think the authors could have dispensed some more of the goodness they are evidently capable of. As it stands, you will at the very minimum need to have a copy of the official Hibernate documentation, plus Hibernate in Action, on your desk, together with Pro Hibernate 3.

Like other people have said, this book is pretty short. To make matters worse, it repeats itself a lot and wastes a lot of pages with boring code such as using 3 pages to show a POJO (plain old java object) with nothing but getters and setters. Did they really need to show that? This book is an ok introduction to hibernate, but definately isn't worth the price. A lot of the same information can be found online, and this book doesn't really present the information in a new or useful way.

I got this book in order to find out what Hibernate was all about and whether I could use it in my projects. I started with no idea of the framework at all and a couple of questions about its general use.

These questions I had were answered right in the first few chapters when the overall usefulness of Hibernate was discussed. And given the well-written chapters of the book (as a non-native English speaker I had absolutely no problems understanding them) I got a good grasp of the Hibernate basics as well.

I think it's a very good book that's surely worth its price.

So you are starting off with Hibernate and you want a book to learn from. If you want the basics and get up an running pretty quickly, then this book works well for you. If you intend to do some complex stuff that is using more underneath tools of Hibernate, then this book might be too surface for you.

I enjoyed the book and recommend it as a beginner's book just starting off. I think the examples and writing style make it an easy to read and understand book. But I also think it stays to high level with Hibernate. Hibernate has an interesting learning curve. The basic simple mappings are easy, but once you get more relational and complex, then the learning curve steepens. I would have liked to have seen this book delve into the more "gotchas" that everyone learning Hibernate always fall into, but it doesn't.

To be fair, I must comment that I read this book after finishing "Hibernate In Action" which is, by far, the finest Hibernate book available.

That being said, I can't remember the last time I was this disappointed with an addition to my library. Little more than a regurgitation of Hibernate's own online documentation this book falls well short of an "Expert's Voice" on the subject material.

As an arm chair book, this resource looks pretty good (though, admittedly it's thin in certain areas) -- you'll get the general idea of what Hibernate is, what it does, and how it does it. So far, so good.

Then at some point you'll actually want to cozy up to the computer with a compiler and try some of the examples. At that point, you'll be tearing your hair out, inventing new curses, and throwing the book against the wall.

My bone to pick? Inconsistency and forward references.

Page 8, the hello world example -- won't work because you haven't read about mappings page 9, or how to apply them page 37.

Page 10, database generation -- a simple command, that won't work until you're off to page 37 again.

Page 17, a huge reference sheet -- you don't need it, not for a while. Why's it here? It spans 3 pages.

Ok, brush stroke all that away and jump to Chapter 3: Building a Simple Application.

You'll be needing Hibernate3 and HSQL for the example, which since this isn't a book on HSQL, you're not going to get much instruction for setting up. Good luck. One hint: on page 28, that's not an 'O' (oh), but a '0' (zero). The thing with /home, you'll have to weasle your Windows install path if you're not on Unix. The code to shutdown the server, should you have enough knowledge to compile it, will require a semicolon on Windows after the class path, or it won't load properly and shutdown.

The Ant example on page 29, the jdbc path is missing the lib directory. The name of the project, chapter03, hasn't been discussed yet - this will be your jar file, btw. Thought you might wanna know.

And the build.xml file you're copying on page 29, well moments later when you go to use and discuss it on page 36, it's subtly changed. Check out src as well as classpath.run. Interesting, eh?

You just typed in a bunch of stuff on page 31, but you're not told the important filename you're supposed to save it to. That's okay, pages 32 and 33 tell you why you may not need it. Surprise, later you will.

Look closely at the all important page 37. Some editor screwed the author. It's clear after multiple scrutinizing passes that a table was intended. This file is available from here, (next row) these files are available from this other directory, and so on. Problem is, you read about something in a paragraph, and then are given the resources - according to the visual format. The reality is, the paragraphs are discussing the content above them. That'll take a while to straighten out.

This book is HORRIBLE for following along, and it's clear no one sat down at page one and started to work through the examples to see if it was even possible.

Information is presented in the wrong order.

Information is incorrect.

Extraneous information not pertinent to the discussion at hand is injected in the middle of what ought to be simple steps to illustrate a point.

This is by far the worse book in the Pro series that I've encountered on a subject.

I was hoping for more in-depth information about Hibernate 3. The book flows ok and is easy to read, but just doesn't have the details that you can find with the general documentation. I should have previewed the book at a local store before buying it. Hibernate in Action is supposed to be the best Hibernate book, but didn't buy it because it is almost 2 years old now. Looking back, probably should have bought that to get a good foundation, then used the online docs to find the differences with ver 3.

I bought this book as a supplement to Hibernate In Action since I was planning on upgrading to Hibernate 3 and wanted a working example using Hibernate 3's annotations. The examples work but the coverage is extremely light. The online hibernate annotation documentation is much better than the annotation coverage in this book.

I found this book fills in a lot of the gaps left by Hibernate's online docs, but didn't dwell on the simple, basic stuff. It's been particularly useful in the area of defining relationships involving collections--one of the trickiest parts of setting up a mapping.

OK, I want to be fair. This is probably a fine book, especially for users new to Hibernate. For people like me, who have used Hibernate 2.x and want a crash course in the new features of Hibernate 3.0, the material seems a bit light. The book's (lack of) length doesn't help; despite the claim that the book is 275 pages long on Amazon's detail, the last page of the index (facing the cover) on my copy is page 242. I don't know where Amazon gets the information it puts on these pages-probably from the publisher. It's not the fault of the authors that Amazon got it wrong, but you just can't introduce Hibernate to new users AND go into any significant detail on the new Hibernate 3.0 features for experienced users in the number of pages in the book. Hibernate In Action (the book by which all other Hibernate books will be judged, but does not cover 3.0 features yet) is 400+ pages.

All told, there IS useful information in the book about new Hibernate 3.0 features, and I'm sure to refer to the information about annotations when upgrading my apps to 3.0. But most of the information appears to be the same level of depth that you can find online. Perhaps my expectations were a bit high, having read (well, devoured is more like it) Hibernate In Action. But fair or not, I was expecting a bit more than I got (in knowledge AND in sheets of paper).

For those new to Hibernate, this is probably an OK book, especially if you are wanting to start with 3.0 and can't wait for an update to Hibernate In Action.