Customer Reviews

Spring Persistence with Hibernate

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This book has relatively narrow focus on persistence aspect of Spring with Hibernate. The problem is that quality of the writing and information presentation is average/below average while 2 other books on the subject are simply excellent. One is Spring In Action by Craig Walls and one is recently published Spring Enterprise Recipes by Gary Mak. Both books have much better quality of writing (each is totally different from the other) and cover all info presented in Spring Persistence with Hibernate and plus more. A selective reading of few chapters in each of 2 books listed above is faster and easier. The book by Gary Mak is emphasizing changes in Spring 3. I personally liked Spring in Action more but it only covers Spring 2.0 (most of companies currently use 2.5) and updated edition for Spring 3.0 is not due until April 2010.

This book sets out to explain the usage of hibernate with the spring framework. This is basically done in the first chapters. It explains how to configure hibernate from within a spring ApplicationContext and it explains how to write a dao. To bad that, for the dao, they still use the old technique with HibernateTemplate/HibernateDaoSupport which isn't recommended anymore since the release of spring 2.0, it is still in the framework for backwards compatibility. The book would have been better if they would explain this.

The remainder of the book is more or less an introduction to hibernate and explains how to write and execute HQL based queries, use the (Detached)Criteria API. Next to that it tries to explain spring, dependency injection and Spring MVC. In short everything is touched upon, but all just to little.

If you need a kickstart into configuring hibernate and spring and don't have an hibernate knowledge this book could be starting guide. If you already have some knowledge on how to do those things, I would suggest JPA persistency with Hibernate (although a bit dated) and the spring reference guide. For the other parts there are some great books out there.

Packt's "Spring Persistence with Hibernate" covers Spring 2.5. (Take care that you don't confuse it with the soon to be released Apress book with the same title which covers Spring 3.0.)

Packt really needs to work on their editing process. I play a game when reading called "what page for the first typo." The answer was page 3! (chapter vs chapters). I have read some Packt books of good quality, but unfortunately this wasn't one. The numerous typos included basic English, a typo in a code comment on page 364 and worst a typo in a code block on page 24. The later bothers me more as the technical content becomes suspect. As with most Packt books, the examples are longer than I would like and could omit getters/setters earlier.

There were a few cases where I had to go to the JavaDoc to understand distinctions between attribute values. The book text wasn't clear enough and didn't explain when one might want to choose those values. There was also some explanation of how to do something in Hibernate if not using Spring and Spring MVC. Good content, but a bit surprising given the title.

Now for some things I liked: cooks tour example with forward references, coverage of Hibernate and JPA APIs, explanations of IOC and AOP, introduction of DAOs with patterns.

Overall, I'd recommend you pick a different Spring 2.5 book or wait for the Spring 3 books to come out.
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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of JavaRanch.