Hibernate is the leading framework for Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) and data persistence in Java. Since its beginning in 2001, Hibernate has been rapidly developing and becoming a first choice for persistence layer in many Java enterprise applications.

In this review, we’d like to recommend the following titles:

• • Hibernate Made Easy by Cameron McKenzie: You will find learning Hibernate is no longer difficult with this book.
  • Hibernate Search in Action by Emmanuel Bernard and John Griffin: If you are familiar with Hibernate in basics and want to move forward with Search solution, go with this book.
  • Java Persistence with Hibernate (2^nd Edition) by Christian Bauer, Gavin King and Gary Gregory: This book is for those who want to pick a latest book on Hibernate. However it will be released at the end of this year (November 28^th 2013). Its first edition (2006) is quite old to be included in this review.

1. Hibernate Made Easy: Simplified Data Persistence with Hibernate and JPA (Java Persistence API) Annotations

Author: Cameron Wallace McKenzie

Publisher: PulpJava

Published Date: April 25^th 2008

Paperback: 442 pages

Summary: As the title says, this book intends to make learning Hibernate as easy as possible. Indeed, many readers say that they feel funny and easy to learn Hibernate with this book. Like Head First Java, learning is a funny experience, less boring than technical books, as the readers will be joined friendly, informative conversations with Hibernate experts. The author teaches you the basic concepts of persistence frameworks, how Hibernate works, how to configure development environment, how to use annotations (instead of XML) to build mappings from basic to advanced (including inheritance). He also shows you how to design the persistence layer using Data Access Object and Factory design patterns.

The examples used in the book are simple, easy to understand and re-producible. The author doesn’t use any tools like Ant or Eclipse IDE, only plain Java with Hibernate libraries are used, so readers won’t have to do extra setups or configurations for these tools in order to run the examples. That makes learning faster and focused.

Finally, this book is quite good for newbie who want to master Hibernate framework from scratch. However, its drawback is the Hibernate version used is obsolete - 3.2.5 as compared with 4.x of current versions.

Read Full Customer Reviews

Content Coverage:

• Hibernate and JPA annotations.
• Targeted Hibernate version: 3.2.5 (quite old as the current version of Hibernate is 4.x).
• Design the persistence layer using Data Access Object and Factory design patterns.
• Advanced mappings of associations and inheritance.
• Simple and re-producible examples, with MySQL database.

More information about Hibernate Made Easy on Amazon

2. Hibernate Search in Action

Author: Emmanuel Bernard, John Griffin B.A

Publisher: Manning Publications

Published Date: January 04^th 2009

Paperback: 450 pages

Read Full Customer Reviews

Content Coverage:

• • Part 1: Understanding Search Technology

1. • • State of the art.
     • Getting started with Hibernate Search.

• • Part 2: Ending Structural and Synchronization Mismatch

1. • • Mapping simple data structures.
     • Mapping more advanced data structures.
     • Indexing: when, how, what and when.

• • Part 3: Taming the Retrieval Mismatch

1. • • Querying with Hibernate Search.
     • Writing a Lucene query.
     • Filters: cross-cutting restrictions.

• • Part 4: Performance and Scalability

1. • • Performance considerations.
     • Scalability: using Hibernate Search in a cluster.
     • Accessing Lucene natively.

• • Part 5: Native Lucene, Scoring, and the Wheel

1. • • Document ranking.
     • Don’t reinvent the wheel.

More information about Hibernate Search in Action on Amazon

3. Java Persistence with Hibernate (2^nd Edition)

Author: Christian Bauer, Gavin King, Gary Gregory

Publisher: Manning Publications

Published Date: March 28^th 2014

Paperback: 600 pages

Content Coverage: (Updating)

This book has not been released.

Release date: March 28^th 2014.

More information about Java Persistence with Hibernate on Amazon

You may be also interested in:

• Top 8 Books for Java Web Frameworks in 2014
• Recommended books for Struts 2 framework
• Recommended books for Spring framework
• Best Java books for Java EE developers

About the Author:

Nam Ha Minh is certified Java programmer (SCJP and SCWCD). He began programming with Java back in the days of Java 1.4 and has been passionate about it ever since. You can connect with him on Facebook and watch his Java videos on YouTube.