The Open Source Zone

This is a good follow-up to the book by the same authors, Beginning Hibernate: From Novice to Professional (Beginning: from Novice to Professional).

There is a certain feeling of overlap between the two books, but that is probably understandable, seeing that the same authors wrote both. Still, there is valuable information in here.

My primary frustration with the book is that it does not deliver what it promises. I am specifically referring to the book's unfounded assertion that it is explaining how to *automatically* generate POJOs, DAOs, Hibernate XML configuration files, and/or Database Schema's.

Because on my consulting job I use iBatis and their marvelous ABATOR CRUD generator, the bar is set high as far as I'm concerned when I look for corresponding ease of use in Hibernate. The authors crow about the automatic code generation features of Hibernate but never actually explain how to do it beyond generalities that cannot be acted on.

Pro Hibernate 3, which strikes me on some levels as a glorified marketing brochure for Hibernate, is written by two authors whose only previous book is listed on the back cover as being a co-authored book on "Building Portals with the Java Portlet API", and a book by one author called "Pro Struts Applications". That does not seem like a terribly great resume for authors of a book on Hibernate.

I prefer and recommend instead of this book, the book, "Hibernate Quickly" by Peak and Heudecker (published by Manning).

As an arm chair book, this resource looks pretty good (though, admittedly it's thin in certain areas) -- you'll get the general idea of what Hibernate is, what it does, and how it does it. So far, so good.

Then at some point you'll actually want to cozy up to the computer with a compiler and try some of the examples. At that point, you'll be tearing your hair out, inventing new curses, and throwing the book against the wall.

My bone to pick? Inconsistency and forward references.

Page 8, the hello world example -- won't work because you haven't read about mappings page 9, or how to apply them page 37.

Page 10, database generation -- a simple command, that won't work until you're off to page 37 again.

Page 17, a huge reference sheet -- you don't need it, not for a while. Why's it here? It spans 3 pages.

Ok, brush stroke all that away and jump to Chapter 3: Building a Simple Application.

You'll be needing Hibernate3 and HSQL for the example, which since this isn't a book on HSQL, you're not going to get much instruction for setting up. Good luck. One hint: on page 28, that's not an 'O' (oh), but a '0' (zero). The thing with /home, you'll have to weasle your Windows install path if you're not on Unix. The code to shutdown the server, should you have enough knowledge to compile it, will require a semicolon on Windows after the class path, or it won't load properly and shutdown.

The Ant example on page 29, the jdbc path is missing the lib directory. The name of the project, chapter03, hasn't been discussed yet - this will be your jar file, btw. Thought you might wanna know.

And the build.xml file you're copying on page 29, well moments later when you go to use and discuss it on page 36, it's subtly changed. Check out src as well as classpath.run. Interesting, eh?

You just typed in a bunch of stuff on page 31, but you're not told the important filename you're supposed to save it to. That's okay, pages 32 and 33 tell you why you may not need it. Surprise, later you will.

Look closely at the all important page 37. Some editor screwed the author. It's clear after multiple scrutinizing passes that a table was intended. This file is available from here, (next row) these files are available from this other directory, and so on. Problem is, you read about something in a paragraph, and then are given the resources - according to the visual format. The reality is, the paragraphs are discussing the content above them. That'll take a while to straighten out.

This book is HORRIBLE for following along, and it's clear no one sat down at page one and started to work through the examples to see if it was even possible.

Information is presented in the wrong order.

Information is incorrect.

Extraneous information not pertinent to the discussion at hand is injected in the middle of what ought to be simple steps to illustrate a point.

This is by far the worse book in the Pro series that I've encountered on a subject.

The book book has 242 pages in total, where ca 30 are intro + appendix and at least 30 pages are nothing more than POJO's code with fancy getter and setter methods. I guess the author got paid on per-page basis. Conclusion: Do not waste your money!

I've been using Hibernate for a while, mostly Hibernate 2.1.x.

I've got a new project starting, and it's going to be using Hibernate 3, so I decided to book up - get the latest in the Hibernate 3 book universe. When I start a project using a given technology, I usually just snarf up all the best books I can find, read, and begin to implement.

I went to the local B&N, and pulled all the Hibernate 3 books in the Java section (slim pickings, unfortunately), and started to read.

Guess what. These guys have another Hibernate book ("Hibernate, Beginner to Pro", or somesuch), which has direct (and I mean *DIRECT*) transcriptions of what's in *this* book.

I've got a bunch of Hibernate and SQL books already. Had I not taken the time to read, I might have bought two Hibernate 3 books with a lot of common content I really don't need.

So, here's the deal, APress: Make it clear when a given book is a subset of another.

Sorry for the rant. Apart from this, the book looks pretty good. For what it's worth, I say this as a Hibernate user with about 5 years experience of the technology.