Elliott, who authored this book's predecessor, Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook (O'Reilly, 2005), notes that Hibernate has changed tremendously since his earlier book was published: "I continue to get email from readers asking for help on adapting the book's detailed code examples so they work with today's Hibernate. To help deal with that, I wrote an updated "Getting Started with Hibernate 3" pdf, but people still want to learn more about Hibernate, so we realized we needed to update and expand the whole Notebook, which also gave me the opportunity to ask Ryan and Tim to contribute chapters on working with interesting related technologies."
More than a reference, Harnessing Hibernate starts with basic configuration before moving on to demonstrate how to use Hibernate to accomplish practical goals. "If you follow along with the examples--which is easy--you'll have a working Hibernate-based program early in the book and an understanding of how you got there, and how you can change things to solve your own problems," says Elliott.
"I wanted to give people a solid starting point for learning Hibernate that reflects what it's grown into, and add more information about a handful of other projects--like Spring--which dovetail with Hibernate," says Elliott. "We also adopted the Maven Ant tasks so that readers can easily work with the particular tool versions tested in the examples, which will help avoid the little inconsistencies that accumulate over time whenever you write about a thriving open source community."
This book covers Hibernate's primary features, such as mapping from Java classes to database tables and from Java data types to SQL data types, as well as Hibernate's data query and retrieval facilities. Harnessing Hibernate also shows how to:
- Perform object/relational mapping
- Work with persistent data from Java code
- Work with groups and relationships between objects
- Extend Hibernate's rich type support for your own needs
- Simplify query creation using criteria and examples
- Use the Hibernate Query Language (HQL) and understand how it differs from SQL
- Use Hibernate in conjunction with Spring
- Use Hibernate in conjunction with other packages, such as the Stripes web framework and the Eclipse IDE
If you find using SQL to be a chore, Harnessing Hibernate offers you an effective and painless method for working with the information you store in your applications.
For a review copy or more information please email kathrynb@oreilly.com. Please include your delivery address and contact information.
James Elliott is a senior software engineer at Berbee, with fifteen years' professional experience as a systems developer.
Ryan Fowler is a software engineer at Berbee in Madison, WI. He programmed Basic on Apple II machines for a while in elementary school at St. Stephen School in Grand Rapids, MI. He returned to coding in the computer science department at Alma College in Alma, MI while earning his bachelor's degree.
Tim O'Brien is a developer and entrepreneur living in Chicago, IL. He spends his days programming in Java, Python, and Ruby
Additional Resources:
For more information about this book, including table of contents, index, author bios, and cover graphic, see the catalog page for Harnessing Hibernate
James Elliott, Tim O'Brien, Ryan Fowler
ISBN: 9780596517724, 380 pages, $39.99 USD, £24.99 GBP
About O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.