Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: difficult for use as a reference
Comment: No doubt, this is the one book to have on Hibernate, and if you are reading this, you probably know why you need Hibernate. My biggest complaints about the book are the lack of clear separation between describing meta data and the different techniques for representing meta data, and worse, the lack of a usable index. I have had a near 0% hit rate when looking up anything in the index, and there are no usable reference pages. A quick-reference Bauer hopes to create will not be much help if it lacks depth appropriate for the depth of the architecture.
I give this 3 stars by starting at 5 stars for the software itself, subtracting one for the ad-hoc approach to documenting how to use it, and subtracting another for it's lack of usefulness as a reference. Although as I said before, I don't think there is a better book out there for Java persistence.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not an easy read
Comment: This is an incredibly dense book to read. It is not that it is disorganized or lacks conciseness (or detail), rather, it is trying to be everything to everybody and that is what makes it a hard read. In other words, I got the distinct impression that the authors were too anxious not to miss any detail(lest somebody should accuse them of oversimplification) and as a result, readability took a back seat.
I think a better presentation would have been to devote the first few chapters to simple examples covering the most useful aspects and then drill down to esoteric reference level detail in later chapters.
On a personal note, I find it odd that the authors would recommend to use HSQL over mysql as a test database when the latter comes with a plethora of tools and much nicer interfaces, all free of charge, of course.
Anyway, I would not recommend this book if you are new to Hibernate. Instead, get "Hibernate Quickly" also by Manning which is a much better read and will get you up and running in a short time.
Hibernate Quickly
Customer Rating:
Summary: excellent
Comment: Hibernate and JPA are rather large, complex technologies. You owe it to yourself to read a book like this for a thorough understanding. The I'll-pick-it-up-from-the-online-docs probably isn't going to be enough for this topic. This book provides outstanding coverage. It's well written, and since it comes from Hibernate's creators, provides lots of insight about *why* things were done in certain way.
I do have a relatively minor complaint about the organization of the book. I'd like to see the content about advanced mapping topics moved *after* at least a basic discussion of what "conversations" looks like, how persistence contexts behave, etc. I like to read books in order, and think the fundamentals should be addressed before all the nitty-gritty advanced details.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Delivered the item as mentioned in the item description.
Comment: Delivered the item as mentioned in the item description. Very happy.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An utter waste
Comment: The book is one of the most painful experiences I've had in recent time. I'm doing a Ph.D. right now. I know about pain.
Every chapter and section gives every minute detail of the APIs discussed, all the time. It's tough to describe how bad this makes it --- it feels like they're reading the code line by line and discussing every design decision made, in journal format. Paragraphs of side notes and gotchas are integrated right in the text, right in the normal text stream --- making it incredibly painful to filter out the important parts from the irrelevant. It's impossible to tell which parts are irrelevant until you're reading halfway into them, wasting the reader's time, patience, and memory. Then when you try to skip around, half the details you do need are just listed 'as discussed earlier.'
The examples cover little more than using single methods at a time. With the text being unreadable, it also lacks any coherent examples of even a basic application, putting anything they discuss together.
Fundamentally the text assumes that you're going to read and memorize every part of it before doing anything -- for over 800 pages, it's mindblowingly bad.
As a reference, the lack of organization guarantees you'll be digging through dozens of pages to get even basic answers. There is no reference material per se, it's all just reading through what you hope are relevant sections of the book. The index is only 16 pages, and completely worthless in helping you navigate.
3 stars for containing everything you need in there, somewhere. -1 star for being so sadistic about it. -1 star for being worthless as a reference.
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