Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Grad school tome on object/relational persistence and Hibernate implementation of JPA
Comment: As of the writing of this review in early 2008, there is no other work in the marketplace quite like this text. At over 800 pages, Bauer and King cover a lot of ground, starting with the object/relational persistence paradigm and continuing with domain models, mapping, and conversations, addressing specialized situations along the way such as working with legacy databases. Database development is not for the faint of heart, and serious work in this space requires understanding of both object-oriented technology and relational database theory, not to mention the associated business domains. Although this book has received a relatively high amount of positive reviews, readers have also understandably shared their complaints. While at the same time Java Persistence with Hibernate is probably not for everyone, there really are not that many alternatives to learning the necessary material. As with other development frameworks, it is a given that familiarity with the online documentation for Hibernate is required, with the realization that this documentation really only starts to be of benefit once the associated tools start being used. This book provides solid background to prepare the reader for the road ahead, but the reader should also be reminded that the entire book does not need to be read, nor does the material need to be read in order from front to back in order to prepare for that road. Much of the material will probably just not make sense until one gets their feet wet with the technologies. These are the reasons I choose to refer to this text as graduate school training. As Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher, once said, "experience teaches nothing without theory, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play". The change in name for this second edition of the book reflect the fact that Hibernate is now an implementation of the Java Persistence API. Be aware that the authors traverse back and fourth between the conformance of Hibernate to JPA, and what Hibernate provides apart from JPA. I think the decision of the authors to present material on these technologies side-by-side was a wise one, because it helps keep the reader reminded that these are not separate technologies and that there are architectural tradeoffs between sticking to JPA and using Hibernate functionality beyond the specification. Well recommended.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: I Dread Opening This Book
Comment: It seems that many of the 3-star and less reviews here sum up my thoughts so I'll try not to repeat much of that. The worst part of this book is the horrible explanations and partial examples. Even when you find the section you are interested in you then have to wade through three different flavors of solutions: Hibernate with XML, Hibernate with annotations, and JPA. I should be pleased that I have more information but the problem is that these authors don't have clear boundaries between each technology. JPA should have been in a separate book, btw.
Hibernate has been the source of many problems on our project and the ramp up time is huge. It reminds me of EJB 1.0-2.0. Both make a lot of empty promises but end up causing frustration and lost time. A fun game we often play at work is "How can we do what we want in Hibernate?" In other words, we want to do things, but Hibernate is in our way instead of helping us.
I hate Hibernate. I hate this beast of a book. And I hate books written by the creators of their own technology. The authors are arrogant and have a poor understanding of how to teach. I even had to read another book (Beginning Hibernate) in order to handle this book despite JPwH claiming to be useful for beginners. I give this book 3 stars because clearly a lot of work has gone into it plus it has helped out now and then, but boy do these guys know how to make things painful. In the end, I'd like to rip out Hibernate and switch to something like Ibatis SQLMaps, perhaps...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good book when you read it carefully and take it a good reference
Comment: I bought this book long time ago. When I come back today, I find some readers gave bad reviews on this good book. I have to say some my impression about this book:
1. It is not a book for dummy users, it covers a lot of very deep thoughts about the Java persistence.
2. I found it is hard to understand all its contents the first time when I read it. But, until I have to use Hibernate heavily in some projects, I start to read it again and found nearly every question I have in the real projects.
3. It contains many design ideas in creating your database and also how to use Hibernate properly with quite a lot of good code as examples.
4. It is definitely the best reference book out there to cover Hibernate 3.0 usage so far in the book market. Don't be fooled by those dummy readers, decent developers need this book to resolve problems.
Customer Rating:
Summary: You'll want to hibernate aferwards
Comment: Its like the other rewiewers say, it explains every conceivable way to do it, old hibernate using xml files, new using annotation, JPA, jumps around all over the shop, never really explians any of it very well.
If you have trouble hibernating and you are a bear who can read get this Book ! you will be asleep in minutes !
Customer Rating:
Summary: Java Persistence with Hibernate - the book, my review
Comment: You have to know that I've tried. Honestly, I did. I hoped to be able to read each and every page of "Java persistence with Hibernate" (revised edition of "Hibernate in action"), by Christian Bauer and Gavin King. But, I gave up before reading a third of it, then I continued only reading some sections. First, because I know Hibernate, I've used Hibernate in all the Java projects I've been involved with - in the last 5 years or so. Second, because the content from the first edition is more than familiar to me. And third, because this second edition is a massive > 800 pages book (double the number of pages in the first edition). At that rate, the fourth edition will be sold together with some sort of transportation device, because a mere human will not be able to carry that amount of paper. How did this happened ?
Hibernate is the perfect example of a successful Java open-source project. Initially started as a free alternative to commercial object-relational mapping tools, it quickly became mainstream. Lots of Java developers around the world use Hibernate for the data layer inside their projects. It's very comfortable, just set some attributes or ask for a business object instance and Hibernate does all the ugly SQL for you. As a developer, you are then comfortably protected from that nasty relational database, and gently swim in a sea of nicely bound objects. Right ? No, not exactly. Each object-relationship mapping tool has its own ways of being handled efficiently, and this is where books like "Java persistence with Hibernate" come into play. This book teaches you how to work with Hibernate, with a "real-world" example: the Caveat-Emptor online auction application.
Since the first edition of the book was written, lots of things happened in the Hibernate world and you can see their impact in "Java persistence with Hibernate". Most important is the release of the 3.x version line and its different ameliorations and new features: code annotations used as mapping descriptors, package naming reorganization inside the API, but most important the standardization under the umbrella of JPA (Java Persistence API) for a smooth integration with EJB 3 inside Java EE 5 servers. And this, is a little bit funny. Yesterday, Hibernate was the main proof that it is possible to make industrial-quality projects within a "J2EE-less" environment, today Hibernate has put a suit and a tie, joined the ranks of Jboss, then Redhat, and it lures the unsuspecting Java developers towards the wonderful and (sometimes) expensive world of Java EE 5 application servers. Which is not necessarily a bad move for the Hibernate API, but it's a proof that in order to thrive as an open-source project, you need so much more than the Sourceforge account and some passion ...
Enough with that, let's take a look at the book content. Some 75% if it is in fact the content of the first edition, updated and completed. You learn what object-relational mapping is, the advantages, the quirks, the recommended way of developing with Hibernate. For a better understanding, single chapters from the initial book were expanded into 2, sometimes more, chapters. The "unit of work" is now called "a conversation" and you've got a whole new chapter (11) about conversations, which is in fact pretty good stuff about session and transaction management. Christian and Gavin done some great writing about concurrency and isolation in the relatively small 10-th chapter - which is a must read even if you're not interested in Hibernate, but you want to understand once and for all what are these concurrent transaction behaviors everyone is talking about. The entire 13th chapter is dedicated to fetching strategy and caching, which is a must read if you want performance and optimization from your application. There is also a good deal of EJB, JPA and EE 5 - related stuff scattered in multiple chapters. And finally, a solid 50-pages chapter is pimping the JSF (Java Server Faces) compliant web development framework, Jboss Seam. I have only managed to read a few pages of this final chapter, so cannot really comment. Note to self: play a little bit with that Seam thing.
To conclude, is this a fun book ? No. Is this a perfect book to convert young open-source fanatics to the wonders of Hibernate API ? Nope. Is this a book to read cover to cover during a weekend ? Not even close. Then, what is this ? First, it's the best book out there about Hibernate (and there are quite a few on the market right now), maybe even the best book about ORM in Java, in general. It has lots of references to EJB, JPA and EE, it will help you to easily sell a Hibernate project to the management. Even if the final implementation uses Spring ... And finally, it's the best Hibernate reference money can buy. When you have an issue, open the darn index and search, there are 90% chances your problem will be solved. And that's a nice accomplishment. Don't get this book because it's funny, because it's a nice read, about a new innovative open-source project. Buy it because it helps you grok ORM, write better code, deliver quality projects.
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