exhaustive, but with no diagrams | Java Persistence with Hibernate

Pro EJB3 session bean | Java Persistence with Hibernate | Christian Bauer, Gavin King

books:


	• Java Persistence with Hibernate Christian Bauer, Gavin King Manning Publications, 2006 - 904 pages average customer review:based on 57 reviews view larger image
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Good book !

If you are using hibernate using Java persistence API then it is a good book. This means you will be using J2EE 5 based Web container. This book is also a good companion to EJB 3.0 for using Java persistence APIs. If you are trying to understand the good-old hibernate apis then this book falls short a bit.

exhaustive, but with no diagrams

This book has been helpful, and the organization makes sense. However, the lack of figures (ER diagrams, etc.) in favor of additional text is annoying.

Pro EJB3 session bean

In addition to covering Hibernate 3.2 and JPA, this book strongly advocates EJB3 session bean, and goes as far as suggesting use SLSB/SFSB to implement DAO. If you plan to use Hibernate 3.2 and EJB3 together, you will get more value for money from this book.

Since not an EJB3 fan myself, I only purchased the ebook from Manning and still keep Hibernate in Action on my bookshelf.

On the positive side, many important Hibernate features (including 3.2 features) are covered in more depth and HQL is better explained in this book than in HIA, and JPA/Hibernate mapping annotations are well covered too.

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Excellent tutorial, poor for reference

If you want to learn Hibernate principles (and understand the Object vs Relational dilemma), then this is probably the best book around. I found the material to be presented in a very coherent and effective tutorial style, and even though I'm an experienced OO developer and relational database designer, I learned some new ways to approach O/R mapping problems. The Hibernate object state diagram and accompanying text represent the pinnacle of pedagogy: Give the student a firm basis on which s/he can abstract deep underlying principles to use when approaching new problems.

However, if you are already familiar with Hibernate and want a deskside reference, you can get more information from the (free) online documentation. Once you've mastered the basics you won't find yourself going back to this book much (in contrast to real gems like "Programming Perl" or Evan Lenz's "XSL Pocket Reference"). This is primarily due to two major disappointments:

1) There's zero reference material. This is deliberate, and the author explains that one should just read the DTD comments (available online). Sorry, but that's a cop-out. The DTD and comments may describe the SYNTAX of the mapping configuration file, but there's a wealth of information about the SEMANTICS (what does this option really do) that's nowhere to be found.

2) The index is EXTREMELY POOR. This book has less than half the index entries of other similarly sized technical books, and many important terms are not indexed. Want to know the details on "yes_no" fields? The index doesn't even HAVE a "Y" section. You have to know in advance that this is referred to in the "Hibernate Types" section.

Couple this with the fact that the book is basically an expanded version of the online help but without the reference material, and you'll find that this is a "read-once" book. After you've assimilated it you'll use the online help instead, primarily for its searchability.

In summary, if you're new to O/R mapping and Hibernate then I'd rate the book 4 stars, taking off 1 star for the index, which is crucial in a technical book. As a complete work however, I think it deservers only 2.5 stars, but since amazon.com doesn't allow fractional stars I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and go with three.

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