Book Review: Spring Persistence with Hibernate

This review is about Spring Persistence with Hibernate by Ahmad Reza Seddighi from Packt Publishing.

Facts

1. 15 chapters, 441 pages, 38€99
2. This book is intended for beginners but more experienced developers can learn a thing or two
3. This book covers Hibernate and Spring in relation to persistence

Pros

1. The scope of this book is what makes it very interesting. Many books talk about Hibernate and many talk about Spring. Yet, I do not know of many which talk about the use of both in relation to persistence
2. The book is well detailed, taking you by the hand from the bottom to reach a good level of knowledge on the subject
3. It explains plain AOP, then Spring proxies before heading to the transactional stuff

Cons

1. The book is about Hibernate but I would have liked to see a more tight integration with JPA. It is only described as an another way to configure the mappings
2. Nowadays, I think Hibernate XML configuration is becoming obsolete. The book views XML as the main way of configuration, annotations being secondary
3. Some subjects are not documented: for some, that’s not too important (like Hibernate custom SQL operations), for others, that’s a real loss (like the @Transactional Spring annotation)

Conclusion

Despite some minor flaws, Spring Persistence with Hibernate let you go head first into the very complex sujbect of Hibernate. I think that Hibernate has a very low entry ticket, and you can be more productive with it very quickly. On the downside, mistakes will cost you much more than with old plain JDBC. This book serves you Hibernate and Spring concepts on a platter, so you will make less mistakes.

From http://blog.frankel.ch