Rating:  - Developer's Notebook or Notbook?
When I first glanced through _Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook_, I was impressed. Every topic comes with an explanation of what it's about and a "How do I do that?" section that gives a step-by-step guide to getting it done. Most also come with a "Why do I care?" section that explains why that topic is useful and a "What just happened" section, that reviews the material just presented and explains most of the technical details.
It seems like a perfect tutorial for Hibernate.
There is just one problem. The "How do I do that?" sections _don't work_. Either the author wrote them without checking them step-by-step on his computer, or they apply to older versions of the software and have become obsolete. At almost every step I had to go through frustrating gyrations to get it to work, and finally gave up partway through Chapter 2.
Ant wouldn't handle the quick test at the end of chapter 1. I had to build a table of contents for all the jar files on my machine and find the missing classes. And I was lucky -- I had some jar files lying around from the last time I did some Java work back in 2002, that happened to contain the classes needed. They weren't in the ones that came with the downloaded software recommended by the book.
The same thing happened again with the mapping files in chapter 2. Run around and find the missing classes and put them where the JVM can find them.
Then came time to load the generated schema into the database that the book recommends (HSQLDB). It turns out that HSQLDB wants a file, sqltool.rc, that for some reason is never mentioned in the book. I made several attempts to edit this file so that the sample DB schema would work and I could get through the schema task. I never did succeed.
Let there be no mistake. I'm not an 11-year-old trying to start my first project. I've been a software developer for almost 40 years -- compilers, operating systems, and applications. If I have trouble with this book, what will a beginner make of it.
Moral: if you are going to write a tutorial that involves installing software, start with a clean install of your operating system and go throug step-by-step to make sure you haven't left anything out.
Rating: - Out of date for hibernate 3.0
If you are interested in version 2.0 of hibernate, this book works well. If you, however, are interested in learning hibernate 3.0, you will struggle to get anything to work.
Examples:
1. code/ddl generation from mapping xml doesn't work without serious adjustment
2. the session.find command no longer exists (page 48)
3. session.delete(HQL) no longer exists (page 51)
For someone who is trying to learn hibernate, this manual has caused more headaches than it has solved.
Rating:  - I Agree With Everyone Else
What can I say that hasn't already been said about this book? Not much, so I will basically echo what most everyone else has said: This is a clear, concise guide on how to use a valuable tool. The examples are fairly simple and realistic. What I like are the sections surrounding the examples, such as "Why do I care?", "How do I do that?", "What just happened?", and "What about...". These sections essentially surround the examples with more information, allowing you to extrapolate on what was just covered.
Rating: - Hibernate is a great tool, not too sure about the book!
Hibernate is a great Object / Relational Mapping Framework, however this book only touches limited number of things in Hibernate.
I am specifically talking about, Object oriented design examples, non of the examples / samples discussed in the book have any object orientation like subclasses or Interfaces. This is a very huge promise of Hibernate, i.e. it preserves the Object oriented design of users domain objects.
Would have been useful, if this book would discuss even a little about it.
Thanks
Syed Ghaznavi
Rating: - Excelent Book
This book is all you need to know about modeling objects to relational databases. I bought this book prior to knowing Hibernate (I knew of course JDBC, but never developed on top of Object relationship project), and I built my current site (booksPrice) using hibernate with almost no need to get help on outside resources.
I would not hesitate to buy this book even if you are not going to use hibernate immidietly, since it is a great book for software developers in general.
|
