Pro Hibernate 3 (Expert's Voice) (Paperback)

~ Dave Minter (Author), Jeff Linwood (Author)
Key Phrases: annotations toolset, int messageld, public int getld, Entity Bean, Attributes Attribute Values Default Description, Hibernate Query Language (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

informative and useful not only as a learning tool, but as a reference throughout the development of your applications.</a></p></blockquote> <p id="quoteAuthor">&#8212; Gregg Bolinger, JavaRanch Sheriff</p></div>

<p><i>Pro Hibernate 3</i> is the first book to offer complete coverage of the open source lightweight Hibernate 3 and its new features. Authors Dave Minter and Jeff Linwood discuss the new persistence layer and share design tips and best practices. And the duo goes beyond just explaining "how to" use parts of Hibernate; they probe well beneath the surface, and teach you how to step back and solve problems thoroughly.</p>

<p>If you have experience using Java with databases, but lack experience with Hibernate, then this book is ideal for you. Similarly, if you have some familiarity with Hibernate 2 and now want to learn the nuances of version 3, then this book is a wise addition to your library.</p>

About the Author

Jeff Linwood has been involved in software programming since he had a 286 in high school. He got caught up with the Internet when he got access to a UNIX shell account, and it has been downhill ever since. Jeff has published articles on several Jakarta Apache open source projects in Dr. Dobb's Journal, CNET's Builder.com, and JavaWorld. Jeff has a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He currently works for the Gossamer Group in Austin, Texas, on content management and web application syndication systems. He gets to play with all the latest open source projects there. Jeff also co-authored Professional Struts Applications, Building Portals with the Java Portlet API, and Pro Hibernate 3. He was a technical reviewer for Enterprise Java Development on a Budget and Extreme Programming with Ant.

Dave Minter has adored computers since he was small enough to play in the boxes they came in. He built his first PC from discarded, faulty, and obsolete components, and considers that to be the foundation of his career as an integration consultant. Dave is based in London, where he helps large and small companies build systems that "just work." He co-authored Building Portals with the Java Portlet API and Pro Hibernate 3.

Product Details

• Paperback: 242 pages
• Publisher: Apress (June 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590595114
• ISBN-13: 978-1590595114
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #722,189 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Way too thin, October 31, 2005

By	Ugo Cei (Pavia, PV Italy) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars repetitive, February 18, 2006

By	stula1 (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well-written introduction, January 13, 2006

By	Christian Menne (Stuttgart, Germany) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.