Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Deep as a Bible, Heavy as a Bible, Boring as a Bible
Comment: Technically speaking you cannot get much better than this. Java Persistence with Hibernate is accurate, complete, detailed, and full of practical examples. I know this expression is overused but this is really the definite reference, the Bible of Hibernate. Basically any rasonable question you might have about how to use this wonderful persistence tool is in this book.
My only gripe is that while this book makes a great reference or a great aid to the experienced developer to bring his hibernate skills to the best level, it fails miserably when used to learn Hibernate from scratch. It's a pity because with a little more effort this could have been the perfect Hibernate book. In particular, 90 % of the example code is from the 'Caveat Emptor' hibernate reference application. Perfectly nice to the veteran developer, but a beginner needs to see the code in action immediately, and building and analyzing 'Caveat Emptor' or translate the original code into his own 'experiments' will probably be way out of his reach. Finally, the writing style is lofty, self-conceited and abysmally boring, and fails to point out what is important from the (almost always) irrelevant details. This being said, Hibernate Foundations are all in this book, which makes a real treasure trove for a senior developer who has already fought a few battles with Hibernate. A good Hibernate intro book has still to be written, so my only advice to the newbie is try some online tutorials, maybe browse the hibernate official website, find something more 'human-friendly' and 'New-Testament-like' , get to play with Hibernate a little, to the point where you can write a very simple, even rudimentary application, and then you will be ready to start wrestling with this bible.
Customer Rating:
Summary: covers alot - book has grown on me
Comment: I wasn't very happy with this book when I first got it. In fact, I was pretty annoyed. It covered way too much material, tried to cover too many things, from mapping files to annotations to entity use to..... Man, it was frustrating. Just trying to learn the basics and understand how to use Hibernate was impossible. As a beginner, trying to learn Hibernate from this book made me want to throw the book out the window, with the hope that the book might land on the author's head.
Okay, BUT, I managed to learn Hibernate pretty much on my own. But as I got deeper into Hibernate, I found myself coming back to this book more and more. Maybe it didn't explain the basics all that well, but when it came to more advanced topics, you could find the stuff you were looking for, and with a better background in Hibernate, the technical stuff made more sense.
Once you understand Hibernate, and have learned the basics, going back to chapters in this book on deep transactions and other advanced topics really demonstrates the value of this book.
It's not a very good book for learning Hibernate. But once you do learn the basics, and you really need to use Hibernate, this is the book you absolutely need to have around.
I'm glad I didn't throw it out the window, and I'm really glad it didn't hit one of the authors.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The most important and accurate reference to Hibernate
Comment: Java Persistence with Hibernate (JPwH) is the follow up to Christian's and Gavin's Book Hibernate in Action.
This book covers Hibernate 3 and the Java Persistence API in every detail. I would recommend the book to beginners as well as advanced Hibernate users since the authors start with a very good introduction to Java Persistence in general and than dive deeper and deeper into Hibernate's feature set. At the end of each chapter you will find a very helpful comparison between Hibernate and JPA.
Sometimes I was a (very) little bit confused about the switching between Hibernate and JPA inside some of the chapters but this is actually the only downside of the book. However this point doesn't have a bad impact on the overall readability.
A big plus is also the example application that is being used throughout the book and that can be downloaded for free from the Hibernate website.
All in all this book is NOT an "utter waste", it is THE reference reading to Hibernate.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Has a lot of information..Readability issue
Comment: I am new to both hibernate and ORM. I brought this book thinking it will be a casual read. I agree with some of reviews, this book is very hard to read. I need to be sympathetic to authors though. The reason is this book covers a lot of facts and facts that can be translated into real production code. Obviously that is a ambitious task. Problem is reading and assimilating all this information and then quickly applying them in my current project. So I devised a way to read this book. I keep my laptop next to me, I read it page by page, writing code in the side and trying to understand what it means. By doing it I found the book is amazingly error free and just makes a lot of sense. I feel it is worth the price and time. ORM is a hard problem and this is the only available book that covers everything in ORM, JPA and hibernate.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Almost Too Much Info - Decent Reference, Brutal Learning Guide
Comment: Well, there's no doubt that this book has alot of material. The book is massive. But its not a fun book to read, and it's not very helpful at trying to teach you how to use hibernate. Even with this book and the yellow and black Beginning Hibernate book, I really felt I was learning it on my own.
I'll come back to this book to look up certain things, like when I need to do a polymorphic many to many mapping across multiple tables, but using examples like that to try and teach someone the basics isn't very effective.
I just find it so hard to believe that something that is supposed to be so simple and easy to use is so difficult to explain to people.
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