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Harnessing Hibernate review by Petteri Hietavirta
The story line of Harnessing Hibernate follows the author as he builds an application in order to organize music collection. While he progresses and adds more features he also explains caveats and surprises he encounters. This application development provides natural environment to introduce different objects and relations between them.
My first impression was that the book expects reader to know Java and some SQL / DB basics. It will not go in to expert level but it gives pointers to Hibernate reference documentation in case of more advanced issues. Being easy to approach, the book guides through installation and in order to make things a bit easier uses Maven to fetch right dependencies.
The content is basically split into two. The first and bigger half covers Hibernate basic usage. The second part is then reserved for using Hibernate with Spring, Maven and Stripes. Most of the examples are IDE independent as they are executed through Ant. The exception is Hibernate Tools for Eclipse. Even though the majority of the examples are based on console output and HSQLDB there are also examples with Swing and MySQL.
Because example applications are tested using various Ant tasks the author also explains in detail how to apply Ant and Hibernate tool for different use cases. This way the book serves as a simple tutorial for Ant. At the end there are small dedicated chapters for Maven and Stripes.
This book is mostly suitable for a Java developer who has worked with other persistence solutions like Ibatis or needs to start to use one. I had some previous experience with Hibernate 2 with in-house wrapper and recently I have been introducing Hibernate 3 to my current employer. Despite of the beginner friendly approach I was able to pick new ideas and learn about previously overlooked features. Therefore I would recommend Harnessing Hibernate to all Java developers dealing with persistence.
James Elliott; Timothy M. O'Brien; Ryan Fowler
Publisher: O'Reilly
Pub Date: April 28, 2008
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-596-51772-4