Hibernate has exploded on the Java scene, becoming quite popular especially in the last year. The online manual, the wiki website, and the forum are all some of the best open source project documentation out there.
A reasonable question to ask then might be - why buy the book? After all, it's written by Christian Bauer and Gavin King, the two principle authors of both Hibernate and the web site. I've been pondering this and my conclusion is that it's the difference between a release 1.0 and a release 2.0 of software, or the first and second edition of a textbook. Seldom do online docs ever go through a second edition. The result is typically more a series of articles or "how-tos" written over time then a comprehensive manual. In worst cases (not true of Hibernate) the result is a miasma combining notes from the bleeding edge, three different ways to accomplish every task (with no explanation of pros and cons) and a sprinkling of tutorials covering old features and configuration steps that no longer apply.
In Hibernate in Action Christian and Gavin have taken the liberty of rethinking the presentation of Hibernate from the ground up. They've come up with a example of an online auction web site, Caveat Emptor, and used it throughout the book illustrating both basic and advanced issues. I'd recommend it for those getting started in Hibernate and for those needing guidance on advanced Hibernate techniques or ORM application design patterns. Most importantly, the book has a strong emphasis on the practical. It's not just about doing API calls to an open source library, it's about building persistent, layered applications that are maintainable and scalable.
Excellent reference for Hibernate users, September 27, 2004
This is the perfect book for Hibernate users of all levels. For beginners, it walks you through the O/R impedance mismatch and basic ORM concepts and terms. The book then moves on to examples and rounds it all off with extensive discussions about advanced configurations such as caching, lazy instantiation, session management, etc. Throughout the book you'll find tons of tips about best practices that you won't get in the free reference doc that comes with Hibernate. I had over 12 months of intensive experience with Hibernate before getting this book and still learned enough to pay for itself in a couple days' time. Highly recommended!
Superb book for Persistence Layer, September 21, 2004
This book is simply superb. It leads a reader thro insights on how a persistence layer truly needs to be designed and perform when encountered with a foray of relational databases and the Object-Oriented Java programming language. I have been used to EJBs for many years and Hibernate has been a welcome change. The book explains how easily a simple POJO (Plain Old Java Object) can be extended to a transactional class. There's clarity, simplicity and ground-up coverage of the persistence layer - Hibernate. I am recommending the use of Hibernate in my work place, and this book has influenced the decision. I am glad Sun Microsystems' EJB 3.0 specification leverages on Hibernate.
Well, I agree with a lot of what the prior reviewer states (in perhaps fewer words). Hibernate is hopefully going to make other would-be OS standards bearers heed the new reality: to forge a serious following, the ol' 'figure-it-out-yourself, I've-no-time-to-document' will no longer suffice. Consider the fact that there are so many other also rans in this category and the emergence of Hibernate is quite astonishing. This book is only going to catalyze its dominance further. Interestingly, the other part of this instructive example in the importance of documentation has a kind of negative side to it: I got the source and debugged into it on a couple of occasions and it was horrendous. But I've read that it is being refactored and many people are contributing to even rewriting major portions. So maybe it is important to get the function right first because in the OS world, if you do, there will be converts to help solidify the form.
This book does read very well. If you get the PDF version directly from Manning you can also search it quite easily. When Hibernate is used in conjunction with the Eclipse plugin Hibernate Synchronizer, persistence layer drudgery is reduced by orders of magnitude. This is a great example of how the OS process can solve problems that have vexed the collectively billionaire mass of vendors in this space.
本类阅读TOP10
Based on 5 reviews. 
Better than Online Docs, October 3, 2004 