In an age where many technical books are full of typos if not outright misinformation, Hibernate in Action stands out as very well written. It seems that spell-checking has replaced editing for many technical books. This book is not only informational, but easy to comprehend.

The only down side to this book is that it is now somewhat dated in that it does not cover the current release of Hibernate. Nothing on annotations, etc. However, this book is not merely "The Professional Learn Framework X Bible in 23 Days" API memorization aide. Hibernate in Action provides you with the theory of why to use an Object Relational Mapping (ORM) framework and how to best leverage this knowledge. This information is not Hibernate specific and does not lose value with the inevitable new release.

A great book for getting going with Hibernate quickly.
Some parts are heavy going because it is packed with info. This pays off because there is little or no padding/rubbish.

This book is for Hibernate 2. Hibernate 3 is covered by the same authors in Java Persistence with Hibernate

This book is for Hibernate 2. Hibernate 3 is covered by the same authors in Java Persistence with Hibernate

I found this book useful and readable, and it helped me develop my first (and second) Hibernate applications. It begins with a brief overview of the kinds of problems which ORM solutions need to address. It then introduces Hibernate along with a couple of examples, upon which subsequent chapters build. (Some reviewers have criticized the examples, but I thought they were useful, and I didn't have trouble following them) One thing you should be aware of: while this book is a good narrative, it's not as useful as a reference. I find myself paging back and forth among several chapters which cover topics in different levels of detail. That shouldn't be a show-stopper since reference material exists on the web. You might be concerned is the book covers Hibernate 2.1, while Hibernate 3.x and Ejb 3 are out; the book is still relevant and valid, and I've used it along side Hibernate 3 with no problem.

I found this book useful and readable, and it helped me develop my first (and second) Hibernate applications. It begins with a brief overview of the kinds of problems which ORM solutions need to address. It then introduces Hibernate along with a couple of examples, upon which subsequent chapters build. (Some reviewers have criticized the examples, but I thought they were useful, and I didn't have trouble following them) One thing you should be aware of: while this book is a good narrative, it's not as useful as a reference. I find myself paging back and forth among several chapters which cover topics in different levels of detail. That shouldn't be a show-stopper since reference material exists on the web. You might be concerned is the book covers Hibernate 2.1, while Hibernate 3.x and Ejb 3 are out; the book is still relevant and valid, and I've used it along side Hibernate 3 with no problem.

With this book, we have the rare circumstance where the founder and principal developer of the technology has authored the material. Moreover, the back jacket promises that the text would build on a single example to show how to use Hibernate in practice.

Sorry, dear reader. This book falls far, far short of its promise. Yes, you can download a single cogent example. But the authors make only loose reference to that example, choosing instead to offer dozens and dozens of snippets, out of context with the example. A first-class book, such as Mastering WebLogic, not only provides a robust example, but also walks the reader entirely through the example, from design choice, through coding practices, and ultimately into implementation decisions. In stark contrast, this book offers nothing more than a progression through various topics, illustrated via pieces of java classes, leaving the reader to hunt for the relevance to the downloadable application.

The book does have its uses. As you dive into various real-world situations, this book should serve, after some digging, to reveal an optimal approach to solving the problem at hand. The topics are covered to a healthy depth. I suspect this is the best treatise available on abstruse topics such as caching, transaction handling, and mapping to legacy data stores.

This is not a bad book. I'm glad I bought it and glad I read it. Its problem is that it doesn't live up to its hype. It is not "the ultimate Hibernate reference" by any stretch. In fact, it's not much of a reference at all, so if your expectations of it are too high, you may end up disappointed.

If you are serious about learning Hibernate and want to get as much depth and background on as many aspects of it as possible, this book is definitely worth reading. The text is well-written and clear, and the information is straight from the most qualified Hibernate committers.

On the downside, this book is missing most of the important administrative and troubleshoting information you will want when you are actually using Hibernate, the book isn't organized so you can easily find any particular detail, and Hibernate is moving on, so some of the information is dated.

Ultimately, if you want practical information or a good reference on Hibernate, I don't think the question you want to ask is "what book should I buy?" You want to ask "why should I buy a book at all when I get much better info for free from google search?"

When you are first getting started, the "getting started" example from the online doc distributed with Hibernate is comprehensive and useful. By contrast, the "Hello World" example in this book is superficial and missing information you need. For example, the very first thing when you work with Hibernate you'll have to include about a dozen .jar files into your project, and you have several choices among alternative jars that you won't care much about `till you become more advanced. Some help is online, little or none is in "Hibernate in Action."

I think Hibernate is all-in-all a great piece of software. Object-to-relational mapping is a hard problem to solve, Hibernate does a great job at the basics of it, and the world is a better place because the boys from jboss donated us their solution. When it works it's like good magic should be. But when it fails, it fails hard, horks all over itself, and spews out a bunch of mostly unhelpful junk. Hibernate suffers from having been developed by an insular group of developers who are too close to their problem, and who have lucrative day jobs as consultants they need to get back to. The result is not much in the way of troubleshooting help, and troubleshooting help is what you'll find you need most. Hint 1 - you won't find such help in "Hibernate in Action" so go to google and type in the text of the error message you get. Hint 2 - you will find a lot more people asking the same question than people answering it. Perservere and be a good detective and you will figure out what you need.

References are organized so you can easily find that one little detail of information you need right now. References have things like short sections with short clear titles that are language keywords or clearly intuitive concepts. References also have long, detailed indexes with a lot of repitition. "Hibernate in Action" has none of this, and it is devilishly hard to find details in it even though you know they are in there somewhere. My copy has about 25 little sticky note bookmarks to help me find things, but most often I don't bother and I just go straight to google.

Finally, Hibernate has evolved since this book was published. My favorite change is that it now includes support for Java 5 annotations as an alternative to XML or XDoclet configuration. Hibernate is notable, like Struts, in helping you get out of J2EE-EJB hell, and into XML configuration purgatory. Annotations rock in relieving you of the keeping-the-XML-in-sync-with-the-Java torture, and you need a reference that doesn't steer you towards doing it the old way. AFAIK, as of this writing, that's only available online.

I have struggled with Object Relational issues for years and have tried a few different techniques until I stumbled across Hibernate a few months ago. Since then I have started a new medium sized enterprise application and decided to use Hibernate. Needless to say, I was impressed with increased productivity from removing my attention from the relational model and placing my focus on the Object Model.

However, I struggled a bit with the online documentation until I decided to buy this book. I can only say that this book is a great resource for anyone new to Hibernate. I was worried that it would be a paper copy of the online documentation but that was not the case.

The authors started with justifying the need for ORM and justifying the various choices made by the Hibernate development team. They spent some time explaining some basic practices in developing POJO. While more experienced Java developers would not need that explanation it was relevant to how the mapping meta data is constructed and helped me to understand some of the decisions being made by the mapping tool.

The authors also noted alternative practices wherever necessary, making it clear that there were multiple ways to accomplish certain tasks and that the way selected in the book was only superior in the given context.

I have struggled with Object Relational issues for years and have tried a few different techniques until I stumbled across Hibernate a few months ago. Since then I have started a new medium sized enterprise application and decided to use Hibernate. Needless to say, I was impressed with increased productivity from removing my attention from the relational model and placing my focus on the Object Model.

However, I struggled a bit with the online documentation until I decided to buy this book. I can only say that this book is a great resource for anyone new to Hibernate. I was worried that it would be a paper copy of the online documentation but that was not the case.

The authors started with justifying the need for ORM and justifying the various choices made by the Hibernate development team. They spent some time explaining some basic practices in developing POJO. While more experienced Java developers would not need that explanation it was relevant to how the mapping meta data is constructed and helped me to understand some of the decisions being made by the mapping tool.

The authors also noted alternative practices wherever necessary, making it clear that there were multiple ways to accomplish certain tasks and that the way selected in the book was only superior in the given context.

We enjoyed it, had some great hibernate tips, all the guys in the company took it for their vacations to read...

The authors do a fine job explaining the concepts behind object relational mapping in general and Hibernate in particular. Too bad the book is absolutely crippled by its index. For instance, there is no entry for "discriminator" (or anything close to that), so to go back to that section where I positively recall reading about this term, I have to browse the whole book. Ridiculous. Furthermore, the following statement by the authors themselves throws this entire technology into question: "Retrieving persistent objects from the database is one of the most interesting (and complex) parts of working with Hibernate." If this is so complex, than the Java community has been sold a bill of goods, and its no wonder the exodus to Ruby is gaining momentum.

Hibernate is an Object/Relational mapping framework that attempts to bridge the gap between Object-Oriented programming model and relational database model. In the past, many attempts have been made to bridge this gap or replace one with another, but the gap between the two is one of the hard facts of enterprise computing today. Hibernate is one such attempt that enjoys a lot of success in the community today.

Hibernate in Action, authored by "Christian Bauer" and "Gavin King" (Gavin, being the creator of hibernate), is one of the best books on this topic. Traditionally we have witnessed that the best book on a particular technology is not written by the creator of the technology themselves, but by authors who have the proficiency to explain it pragmatically. Gavin, breaks the shackles and contributes the best book for the technology he created.

The primary target audience is java developers who work with SQL based database systems and have struggled hard to bridge the gap themselves.

The book starts by explaining what "Object/Relational paradigm mismatch" is all about. The authors weigh this to be the prime motivation for any ORM implementation, and wish that the users understand this mismatch, before they jump-in believing that ORM is the magic bullet for all their problems.

The chapters "Introducing and Integrating hibernate", "Mapping persistent classes", "Working with persistent objects" and "Transactions, concurrency, and caching" introduces the basics for various aspects of hibernate. These chapters are the most beneficial part of the book and well exceed the book's cost.

The chapters "Advanced mapping concepts", "Retrieving objects efficiently", "Writing hibernate applications" and "Using the toolset" focus on the advanced concepts. These chapters are rather dry and are mostly useful for reference purposes only. So, if you get lost while reading these chapters, don't worry. It covers so many advanced concepts that not everything will fit into one's head in the first pass. If you frequently visit this section for reference while developing hibernate applications, you will start to appreciate this section slowly but steadily.

In my opinion, if you want just one book to learn and use hibernate for your next project, look no further.

But, don't forget, the next edition is just round the corner. It covers Hibernate 3.x and also includes full coverage of the EJB 3.0's sub specification called Java Persistence API (JPA). So, if you are not in any urgency, then you might want to wait, otherwise, go ahead and get this one for your bookshelf as soon as you can. You won't regret it.

Great book about Hibernate. A good chunk of the book won't be useful to you if you're looking to use it with NHibernate, but the rest is relevent.

I must say , this is an awesome book . All one needs to know about Hibernate from basic to advanced . The best thing is that this book can be used by all level of people - basic and advanced. Highly Recommended , but why buy it at higher cost when you can have the pdf version at lower cost , just $10. Email me to find out : reshmahind@yahoo.com

Buy this book if you want to get an excellent in-depth understanding of Hibernate. The coverage of Hiberate is extremely well organized. I found myself quickly reading the book from cover to cover. Once I began real development work with NHibernate I found myself continually returning to use the book as a reference. Both the Table of Contents and the Index are very well organized; this reduced the time it took to find critical information during development. A few implementation details are different for NHibernate but they are all described on the NHibernate web site.

This is a solid title that introduces all of the key concepts in Hibernate: OR-mapping, associations, the persistence lifecycle, transactions, caching, querying and optimiziation for performance. The book is authored by two of the lead Hibernate developers so you know that everything is dead-on accurate.

One detractor: this book was written in 2004 when 2.x was the current version. While the changes in the base features between 2.x and 3.x aren't terribly significant there have been some heavy changes to some of the more advanced features, especially the "Hibernate Tools" project. For example, the Ant tasks have underwent a complete overhaul so some of the parts near the end of the book are a bit off.

Unfortunately it might be a while before they release a 2nd edition of the book as Hibernate is still being tweaked to ensure compliance with JPA 1.0 as part of JEE 5.0. All that being said, this is a solid title but you should definitely spend time with the excellent Hibernate Reference Guide available from the web site.

Its so refreshing ( and rare ) to get a programming book that is so clear and concise. The authors don't rehash information a good java developer already knows or cut and paste APIs we already have from javadocs. I learned alot.

I had high hopes from this book after reading several other reviews. However its been a real disappointment in terms of not enough explanations of subject matter alongwith few workable examples. The book does start of well with a "Hello World" example but then looses focus providing the reader with several confusing details and code snippets.

I am new to the Hibernate project, having tried it out on a relatively simply project for a client. I am actually using the NHibernate port of Hibernate 2.1 in an ASP.NET environment, but it is almost identical to the original Java version. Anyway, I was struggling with some (all!) of the finer points of session-per-request, one-to-many relationships, etc. After reading a lot of good articles online and many of the book reviews here, I ordered this book.

Result? I went out to dinner, took Hibernate in Action with me, and couldn't put it down. I think if you have poked around with Hibernate / NHibernate enough to understand some of the terminology, you absolutely cannot do better than to buy this. I'm really impressed by the matter of fact way in which things are explained both through example and in theory.

Before you buy this book, understand that this is based on an earlier version of Hibernate. I just can't wait to get the next edition of the book that would deal with the latest developments in the Hibernate world.

Before I started the book, I only had a rough idea about Hibernate. I am by no means a starter in this subject after having implemented an ORM strategy thru in-house means for our thousands of tables. Going thru the documentation and examples is a bit of pain to say the least. So, I was not sure about this book before I bought it.

Now, I am almost half way thru the book and understand the "logic" behind hibernate and how it works and what design considerations need to be made for a better implementation. The subject is vast still the treatment given by the authors is so good you will be able to grasp the theory behind the subject that should put you in a position to understand and appreciate Hibernate or any other ORM tool.

Hibernate Quickly is a well-written introduction to this O/R tool. The book is an excellent resource for the developer who is getting acquainted with Hibernate. The examples provided in the book help the reader to understand the concepts. I especially like the explanation of mapping, something that can be confusing to someone new to Hibernate. The book also covers using Hibernate with Struts, XDocket, Spring, and Tapestry. Also valuable are the sections on using Hibernate with Ant and Junit. This is a great book for users new to Hibernate.

First, I rarely have the time to read a book cover to cover. I buy a book like this to quickly look up information to get something specific accomplished. So I rely on the index a LOT.

For the purpose I bought it, this book is aweful. Let me give an example. I'm writing the hbm.xml file for a very simple table that has a key, but this table, is static and never programatically changes (there are no insert or alter operations). So I'm looking for the right generator to use. I go to the index to find "generators". Nope, nada. So I'm thinking well maybe its in a description of the id, but nope, nothing under id. Actually, I've yet to go to the index once to find what I was looking for. In my 25 years of programming, I've never found a book to be so useless. Maybe I'm just using it wrong and it deserves a cover to cover read. Everyone else seems to love it.

I did also get Hibernate Quickly and went through the 1st 4 or 5 chapters chapters to get an app running. This book I didn't buy as a reference so a direct comparison isn't fair, but if you're looking to get something going quickly I thought it was well done.

In conjunction with the online documentation, you almost can't go wrong. I use it at tavisys to help with my J2EE and Java development.

May be this book is good in explaining the concept. But when we want to learn a new technology, first thing the learner is looking for is to run a "HELLO WORLD" type of program.In order to run my first program I had to go thru hell to run it. My advice it if you want to learn HIBERNATE for the first time this is not the book.

I love it when a tech book is well-written, meaning the author or authors not only understand the technical subject, but possess writing talent as well. The authors of this book did a great job.

This is the the authoritative user's guide to Hibernate. There is no easier way to attain a level of competency in the use of Hibernate sufficient for most real-world projects.

For those who are less experienced in Java programming, I recommend first buying the introduction to Hibernate from the Developer's Notebook series. This was my first Hibernate book, and it had me up and running with a very simple demonstration of how Hibernate works in about ten minutes. But this book won't give you the depth of knowledge you need to do anything more than a very simple project. After you're up and running with the basics, move on to Hibernate In Action.

For those who have somehow attained proficiency in the most commonly-used features of Hibernate without reading Hibernate In Action, you might not need it any more. It hits the sweet spot of containing everything that most developers will need for most projects without burying the reader in arcana. However, its coverage of more advanced features such as Interceptors is rather limited. By the time you have reached an intermediate level of expertise in Hibernate, you'll probably be able to make do with the Javadoc and online documentation to get a handle on the advanced stuff.

This book was my first introduction to Hibernate. It was very good to begin with. Some chapters can even be useful when you already know Hibernate. But the book lacks some more deep coverage of some advanced issues. Combined with documentation on hibernate.org it is sufficent for most scenarios.

But it would need to be updated for Hibernate 3. Therefor only 4 stars.

After having spent on useless Professional Hibernate, I bought this book in greater anticipation, atleast to get clear understanding on Associations, which always have been a big headache in Hibernate.

I wonder what these Authors think about readers who look for books that could help them to learn new technologies. Instead of merely coping what is available in hibernate.org, (of course they did change object/class names wonderfully), they should give us WORKING examples.

One has to scratch his head just to get things work.

Honestly, this book discusses some of best strategies one has to follow while persisting important data. But main topic has been explained in IDIOTIC manner.

If you want to learn a lot about hibernate and a lot about O/R mapping then this is the book to get. The book is *VERY* well written and has more gems in it than just hibernate. There's a lot of good information in there regarding database design/theory and how it applies to applications, etc. I have nothing bad to say about this book. This is a must-have for someone who uses Hibernate or wants to learn how to use it.

In addition to the indept coverage on hiberate tool, this book covers a lot of theory on generic issues related to transactions,concurrency, caching etc.
An excellent book straight from the authors of an excellent product.

I bought this book without carefully looking at the cover that this book is a definiteive reference. So the content is a bit too verbose for my expectation. I am looking for something that's a bit tutorial with rationales given here and there. Not a reference, whose information I can find from the website.

I picked up some info about Hibernate from the Hibernate-site and the tutorial from there, but this book really tought me what Hibernate is all about.

This is simply the best Hibernate book out there. I've picked up a few others and skimmed through them at bookstores, and nothing comes close to the depth of this book. This edition does not cover Hibernate 3.0 (which was just recently released), but there is a second edition in the works (http://blog.hibernate.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/2005/07/02#hia_secondedition).

After becoming hooked on Hibernate after reading this book, I wanted to migrate to Hibernate 3. So I ordered another title (the first to market with Hibernate 3 info). It was far inferior to Hibernate In Action; I actually sent it back (the only time I have ever done this). I mention this not to blast the other title, but to indicate how far above the pack I think Hibernate In Action is.

This book is a tremendous resource, whether you are curious about Hibernate, building your first Hibernate app, or an experienced Hibernate user. I can't recommend it enough.