Beginning Hibernate: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: from Novice to Professional) (Paperback)

~ Jeff Linwood (Author), (Author)
Key Phrases: reverse engineering file, generating primary key values, hibernate types, Test Message, Test Email, Attributes Attribute Values Default Description (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Beginning Hibernate is ideal if youre experienced in Java with databases (the traditional, or "connected," approach), but are new to open source lightweight Hibernatethe most popular de facto object-relational mapping and database-oriented application development framework. This book packs in brand new information about the latest release of the Hibernate 3.2.x persistence layer and provides a clear introduction to the current standard for object-relational persistence in Java.

Experienced author Dave Minter and contributor Jeff Linwood provide more in-depth examples than any other books for Hibernate beginners. The authors also present material in a lively, example-based mannernot in a dry, theoretical, hard-to-read fashion. And since the book keeps its focus on Hibernate without wasting time on nonessential third-party tools, youll be able to immediately start building transaction-based engines and applications.

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: 360 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 3 edition (August 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590596935
• ISBN-13: 978-1590596937
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #158,308 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #29 in

  Books > Computers & Internet > Databases > Beginning & Introductory

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars How Awful Can A Book really Be? An Awful Book for Learning, October 2, 2007

By	Kev McMurray (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews

I just can't tell you how frustrated I am at trying to learn Hibernate with this useless book.

I mean, I'm a patient guy, and I know technology well, but trying to learn from this book is brutal.

The examples are all over the place. In chapter 6, you get into annotations, and they've got this huge example with all these tables and garbage. All i want to know is how to do a simple one-to-many mapping between two tables - that's it! But instead, I get five classes with many to one, one to many, many to many, and all this other stuff that obfuscates the point so much, it's not even worth it.

And what's more, they deal with all this code and table references, but there's no ERD diagram to be found. I mean, where is it? I'm jumping from code to annotations to create SQL scripts - I want a simple ERD diagram to show me what's connecting where.

And this book makes no effort to explain. I loved this sentence "The mappedBy attribute is mandatory." Ok, could you maybe tell me what it means, what it does, or what it represents? Is that too much to ask.

Plus, simple stuff is just missing. A simple one-to-one relationship with xml is never demonstrated - just a pathetic description of the xml entry that doesn't describe at all how to do a mapping.

Plus, the book shoots page after page of definitions that look like it was pulled directy from the documentation, but no examples of how to use them in your code - just filler.

I really hate this book. The authors may know Hibernate, but they know nothing about teaching or helping someone understand a technology. I'm shoving this book in the garbage.

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE BEST YET, October 28, 2006

By	H. Wu "Code Shogun" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I bought Hibernate in Action a few months ago (claims to be the Hibernate Bible by some folks). Well it's a good book, but many details and tricky stuff were left out. I had some problems finding useful information from that book.

Beginning Hibernate offers MANY MANY more tips. Its written style is consice and to the point. I actually found 2 solutions to the problems I encountered on my first Hibernate project. Very clear explanation on association, class mappings, HQL and Annotations. Definitely recommended to beginners (such as me) and veterans!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A bad name for a really good book, January 29, 2008

By	Rich Rosen "web application architect, author... - See all my reviews

I found this book to be really well organized and methodical, starting with the basics of Hibernate and working up to more complex aspects and features in a gradual, measured fashion. My only prior exposure to a book on Hibernate was Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook; it was short and sweet, and of necessity was kind of lightweight, not sufficient for really getting into Hibernate deeply. I looked at Java Persistence with Hibernate but found it kind of baroque. Although that seems to be the most popular book on the subject, I found its approach not especially conducive to learning the subject matter.

My background is that I am an experienced Java/J2EE programmer with a strong database background. My organization has been making use of Hibernate but others in my group have been the ones really blazing the trails. So I'd been exposed to Hibernate usage, I could "get" a good portion of what's going on under the hood, but I required better and deeper understanding if I wanted to work more intimately with our lower-level "DAO" code.

Most complaints I'm seeing here seem to be saying that this book is not for beginners. First, I would question what kind of "beginners" we are talking about--would a novice Web designer who can use design tools but doesn't know HTML, or a PHP programmer who doesn't know Java or J2EE or enterprise design patterns, find this book useful and readable? I don't think so. So I would have to agree, this is not a book for that kind of "beginner".

But this is an indictment of the title, not of the book itself. This IS a book that starts at the beginning and works its way up to rather advanced stuff in what I thought was a well-organized manner. The material in later chapters requires background and experience with other aspects of Java and database technology, including understanding of annotations, abstract query language concepts, etc.

For a lighter-weight introduction to Hibernate I might recommend Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook, but if you are really looking to get into the trenches and dig deep, I found this book to be excellent. I've been told that other APress books named "Beginning XXXXX" are mis-titled, that the "Beginning" title really isn't appropriate and really doesn't do the book(s) justice. So be aware that these are books that start at the "beginning" but that doesn't mean they're necessarily appropriate for total neophytes in related technologies.