Very preliminary will not help you archtect a solution
This book gives you a fast paced introduction. However, if you are trying to figure out how Hibernate fits into your architecture e.g. how it relates to your business logic, how it can be configured in a DAO architecture, etc., etc. you need to look elsewhere.
For a beginner it is definitely better then the documentation that comes with hibernate. Be prepared to buy a more advanced book if you want to do serious work with Hibernate.
NOT for beginners!
This book is not intended as a comprehensive/blow-by-blow tutorial. It is a part of o'reilly's new 'notebook' series which is intended as a VERY brief intro to a new technology for experienced developers.
This book is for folks who are pretty experienced with Java and databases, and its intention is to provide a very high-level fast-paced into to hibernate.
In my opinion, it does these things well. I've got about 9 years experience with Java, and about 15 years with SQL/databases, and about 15 years commercial development experience. I've never used hibernate, and I decided to use it in a project. I'm in a HUGE hurry, and I needed to get up to speed FAST. This book got me there. In this sense, I think the book succeeds very well.
There are plenty of spots where I needed additional help, and a quick web search or a quick jump out to hibernates reference documentation (hibernate.org) was all that was required.
This book does what it intends. If you need hand-holding, detailed instructions, or in-depth tutorials, find another book. (And as far as I know, there aren't any).
:)
Ramping up on an automated databasing framework
Hibernate is a remarkable open source framework for Java which takes care of all the nasty JDBC coding you have to do for any application involving a database. One of the problems with JDBC is that it embeds SQL scripts directly into the Java code. This practice takes away from the object oriented quality of Java and results in messy code that is hard to debug and maintain. Hibernate helps Java developers in this regard by automating much of the databasing aspects of JDBCssh ssh .
Admittedly, this is the first 'Developer's Notebook' I have read from O'Reilly and I found it to be an excellent walk-through on Hibernate. This book is actually a text that you can read cover to cover comfortably while in front of the computer going through and developing their toy application. This style of book makes it really easy for anyone to pick up Hibernate over a few days, which is really nice as opposed to having to dig around the Web and IRC looking for advice on how stuff works. It even covers how to use ant, a tool similar to make, minus all the problems of make for Java, to get started on your hibernate applications.
One of the beefs I had with this book though is that it did not stress the importance of Entity Relationship (ER) design when developing a hibernate application. Hibernate does not make the need for ER-diagramming go away but in fact quite the opposite; if your applications are to be flexible and extensible it will need to have a good ER-design. Hibernate involves a fair bit of XML configuration before it can interact with your database and if you have to be mucking around with your ER-design during development then this becomes a pain. While this should be apparent to seasoned developers, it is something that newbies may miss out on. As such, I think it would have been well worth it for this book to have included an appendix on ER-design for completeness sake.
Original review can be found at:
http://www.dal-acm.ca/ORug/Review20050718
Learn Hibernate fast
If you're wondering what Hibernate is and what it could do for you, this is the right book, if you want to know the deep function of Hibernate this book is not.
This book intends to teach you in an easy and fast way, i read and write (i say write not copy) the examples in less than a week. Yes you wont know all deep tricks: thats not the objetive, but who cares about it when you want to learn something usefull for the next proyect, believe me, you will want to use Hibernate. (If i had known hibernate in my last proyect i had save 3 weeks of hard work).
I didnt have problems with the examples, some people claim that they had problems with examples i dont kwon why, all problems i had were my own mistakes, if you follow the instrucctions you wont have problems.
When you have finished you will be ready to use the most valuable aspects and if you want to go further you will be able to read the awfull documentation.
Other claim is that its not about the Hibernate 3, well i dont care too much about something in beta version, if you care there is only one book in amazon related to Hibernate 3.
To put it simple: buy this to learn all usefull things in Hibernate in a easy and fast way.
its ok
i think it is an ok book,
certainly it does give u a start, but it is not for u if u want a comprehensive book.
The content is written in a very understandable fashion.
but lot of the content he picked didnt make me feel was worth mentioning.
