Spotlight customer reviews:
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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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Is it really this hard ?
Comment: I feel a little odd rating this thing as low as two stars. After all, it does pack a lot of information into its 800+ pages. And that does make it a single point of reference ... sort of.
It's when I actually tried to use this fat tome to learn how to work with Hibernate that I encountered the first problem. I can't recommend that approach. This book is a terrible way to learn how to use Hibernate. It talks endlessly about all kinds of detail about everything you might want to do, and even provides many incomplete code snippets. But surprisingly it doesn't sit you down and walk you through a simple application actually using Hibernate. The authors do provide a full-blown application you can download and work through - but that won't be easy, dear reader, and it will take you a while to distill the basics from the advanced usage.
This seems to be a problem with most Hibernate books, for some reason - they all think they need to explain ORM to the world rather than simply show how to create an application. Explaining ORM AND showing how to build an application might be better.
So, OK, perhaps, I thought, this will become my master reference. Then I encountered the second problem. There's no good way to drill quickly to a nugget of information you need, which, after all, is the essence of a reference. Instead you will have to read through the theoretical explanations and design discussions to figure out if the trail leads you to the specific nugget you need to get your software working.
In the end I realized that the book is not good as a tutorial and not good as a reference and I was left to wonder what it might be good for. This surprised me, to be honest.
As far as I am aware, no practical Hibernate book has been written, so it would be unfair to single out this one. (The Manning book, Hibernate Quickly, is simply incorrect at too many points - you have to figure out the coding and config errors.) So I'm not singling out this one. However, in my view the praise for this book is directed at the terrific work done by the authors in creating and maintaining Hibernate rather than their work on this book. Their work in this book is unfocused and, while comprehensive and correct, ultimately difficult to use for any practical purpose.
If you want to learn how to use Hibernate, the best way I know is to work with some of the tutorials available on the Web or to download an app server and follow their documentation. You might not learn about "theta-style joins", but you will certainly learn to use Hibernate to create software much more quickly that way than by using this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best and Only Hibernate Reference Book Out there
Comment:
Cutting long story short, Hibernate in Action is the Book to have if you are working on a Hibernate Project, and YES, it does offer something more than the reference manual does in my opinion, and there fore it is worth buying.( Well unless you'd want to go for that 2k $ courses at Red Hat or Exadel or Interface 21 ( Spring people ) ).
This is a bigger version of the older Hibernate in Action & can be called as reference on the desk for Hibernate professionals out there, not only does it explain hows and whens and whys of Hibernate, but the interesting aspect to me was finding useful and often intuitive patterns and their solutions in the Book and that just doesn't include Hibernate's ever popular OSIV pattern but other things as well.
The book also covers JPA and Hibernate's JPA implementation to some extent. Although i think Hibernate's Entity Manager in Manual ( reference manual ) does a better job explaining nuts and bolts. But still its something, other than that there's lots of cool stuff, like Using Objects efficiently, SQL optimizations etc. You'll definitely love this book, because it starts from simplistic examples for newbies out there but also covers enough depth and breadth ...
All in all, Best Investment you'd ever make in Hibernate Arena. Should you finish this book, you'll be an expert in Hibernate Guaranteed.
Regards
Vyas, Anirudh
Customer Rating:
Summary: THE Reference
Comment: This is THE reference book for Hibernate 3. Authored by the people who designed and developed the framework, it covers every aspect of the product.
If you are a beginner with Hibernate this book may be a little overwhelming and confusing with so much information so I recommend a little less encyclopedic text (I'm not paid to endorse so you'll have to find them yourself). There are several out there that are excellent.
Customer Rating:
Summary: If you're using Spring 2.x, you need this book
Comment: This book is a welcome update to the original. It has much new stuff, including how to write contract-first web services using Spring Web Services. It's definitely earned a spot on my shelf until Spring 3.x :-)
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