This is a review of “Java Persistence with Hibernate” by Christian Bauer and Gavin King
This is the second Manning book on Hibernate to find a place on my bookshelf. The first one being the older 1st edition of “Hibernate in Action”, however this book is a revised edition of the 1st edition and takes the cake as it is one of the most comprehensive books to cover this standard in the Java world of ORMs. Having personally written an ORM from the ground up during a previous project I can appreciate Hibernate’s popularity and the work the developers put into the project.
Now on to the book. At roughly 800 pages and published in 2007, this book basically covers version 3.2 of Hibernate so at its core, it is still very relevant for the majority of the things you will be doing with the latest version available today.
This book progressively takes the reader from the basics of understanding object persistence and object mapping all the way through optimizing fetching strategies and advanced queries. The book covers every aspect of Hibernate in a guided approach, driven by clearly laid out examples targeted toward the specific feature/context at hand. The book is not a quick reference guide, but caters more towards the individual who wants to get a full grasp of the major features in an example driven approach. I have used this book many times before implementing a particular feature, as a way to get a good refresh of the principles behind a feature and how it works within the larger context of the Hibernate environment.
I would recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn about or uses Hibernate on a daily basis. Any beginner who is competent in Java and has worked with a minimum of JDBC before, should be able to pick this book up and understand Hibernate with ease. Likewise, for those who are intermediate to advanced with ORMs will also be able to learn quite a bit by having this book handy when you need to better understand one of the many, many features that Hibernate provides.
Negatives: The only negative about this book is that they dedicate an entire chapter (~80 pages) to JBoss Seam, which seemed like a plug.
Recommended: Yes
Skill Levels: Beginner to Advanced. Beginner’s can read cover to cover over a solid period of time to fully understand the product. Intermediate to advanced can use the detailed table of contents to jump to a particular subject quickly and read excellent coverage of the feature of interest.
Side Note: Why is it that Oreilly only has one Hibernate book out on the market? It would seem that they should have more and Manning has the corner on the Hibernate titles. P.S. The Oreilly book is pretty good, more recent, but not nearly the extensive coverage contained in this title.
