Friday, July 11, 2008

Review: Hibernate Made Easy: Simplified Data Persistence with Hibernate3 and JPA Annotations (Java Persistence API)

Here's a great review I just received on amazon.

You know, I really love getting feedback for my books. I appreciate criticism, I incorporate updates and fixes quickly, and I always take feedback seriously. The nice thing about self-publishing is that I can get updates, changes and improvements into press within a few weeks.

Anyways, I just got this review from who I consider to be a new friend, on Amazon.com. Certainly made my day, which is quite an accomplishment on a day when the DOW dropped below 11000. :)

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Hibernate3 & JPA Book Review: Hibernate Made Easy


5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent step by step guide to learning Hibernate, July 11, 2008
By J. Dewberry (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
I love this book. I wish all technical books were written this way.

A few months ago, I had a job interview and they asked me if I knew Hibernate. I told them that I didn't know it, but i could learn it. So they gave me a little sample database problem - they wanted me to build a one-to-many, bi-directional join - and asked me to spend the weekend reading tutorials on the web and see if I could get something up and running by Monday morning. So I hit it hard. I read everything I could find, just trying to get something that worked. But I wasnt able to get it working, so I didnt get the job. But I still wanted to learn Hibernate, so I bought the book "Java Persistence with Hibernate" that everybody raves about. That book was not good for me. It seemed ponderous. It has all sorts of references to JSR white papers and stuff like that. I dont care about all that. I just wanted to find something that would help me figure out how to get my project running. I read 500 pages of that book, and I still felt confused.

So then I bought Hibernate Made Easy, and I LOVE it! It starts out with some very simple examples, so you get something working and you start to gain confidence. The first chapter is about how to set up Hibernate, and the second chapter is about testing your setup. Then he starts off with some very simple code that saves a record to the database. And then gradually he increases the complexity of the problems and the solutions until by the end of the book you're ready to solve real world problems. It's great. It's very logical and straightforward, and surprisingly, it's also fun to read. I mean, this is a book about Java persistence, but it's fun to read. How did he do that?

This book is thorough, easy to read, light-hearted, and it tackles all the difficult topics in a logical, step-by-step way. I think it's an outstanding book. After reading it I feel prepared to tackle my next interview. I feel like I can confidently say "I know Hibernate."

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