The best book in circulation on Hibernate , 18 Oct 2008
I was new to Hibernate when I finally decided to buy this book. I must say it has been a pleasure reading it from first to last page. If one wants to become very proficient at hibernate, I strongly recommend this book. Not only it tells the reader everything there is to know about Hibernate (and I mean everything!) but it also presents both the Hibernate world and the JPA world. Obviously the HB world provides much more functionalities than the JPA, but then the JPA is only in its first release and many of the functionalities today provided by HB will be available in JPA. By the end of this book you'll be able to work proficiently on HB and address also advanced issues such as performance optimisation (with 1st and 2nd level caches), reporting queries, design and testing patterns.

Awesome book. Deceptive title., 23 May 2008
For me a more apt title would have been: "ORM with Hibernate and EJB3".

This book conveys loads of excellent information.

There is a great Domain Model "Caveat Emptor" that is used as backdrop for the bulk of the book based upon an auction system to convey the intricacies of the technologies.

* Part 1 (about 150 pages) is more example orientated and shows how to use Ant tasks to turn Java entities annotated with meta-data or in association with XML to DDL/SQL and vice-versa.
* The next 540 pages (Part 2 & first section of Part 3) make up the bulk of the book. This part is more of a reference. This material is very informative, but a bit of a slog,
heavy going and dry at times. Quite taxing on the old brain!
The format generally the following pattern:
-> The Hibernate way of doing things. Sometimes with XML. Sometimes with annotations.
-> The EJB3 way.
-> How Hibernate can compliment EJB3 and sometimes vice-versa.
-> A summation highlighting two technologies.
* The last two chapters of Part 3 (next 200 pages) are awesome and what make the book really shine.
They return to a more easy to understand example driven format and tie everything together.
The penultimate chapter has a good discussion on architectural concerns. (Unfortunately you ought to plough through the detailed reference section to best understand everything).
There is also an interesting introduction to TestNG.
* The last chapter goes on to demonstrate Seam. As a framework it overcomes some of the pitfalls of JSF. It has definately sparked my interest in learning more about Seam
and rekindled my interest in JSF.
* On a final note. It's also a great SQL reference to boot.
Great job Christian and Gavin!

Too much., 13 Nov 2007
I've recently been reading Java Persistence with Hibernate, having had limited experience with Hibernate previously. My thinking was that a book this size should provide a really gentle but complete coverage.

After 5 months, I had got as far as Chapter 7. Normally, I fly through books, but there was something about this one that just didn't work for me. I don't like 'giving up', but by chapter 7 I asked myself honestly a) was I enjoying it and b) was I learning, and I came to 'no' for both.

The book (as we know) was written by the authors of Hibernate, and to this end they know it inside out. However, this is also their weakness. Instead of giving me what I needed - an overview, followed by some good examples that I could follow and learn from, they would show me one way to do something in Hibernate, then in annotations, then with JPA xml, then with JPA annotations except for the bits that couldn't be reached and so had to use Hibernate annotations. Then they would give me a reason/situation when this approach couldn't be used, and the process would start over with a new technique. As a reference, this is excellent. As a learning book, it's a nightmare, so much so that I've stopped reading.

The definitive hibernate reference, 14 Sep 2007
If you are going to buy a book about how to use Hibernate, this is the one to get.

It has in depth coverage of native Hibernate, JPA (just because JPA is a standard doesn't make it evil) and the Hibernate implementation of JPA. It also covers the issues surrounding object/relational mapping and various "architectural" options for using persistent objects in an application.

It's a big book - it needs to be, it covers a lot of ground and contains a lot of detail. I'd go for the PDF version, it weighs less and you can use the PDF reader to search the text.

Could have been so much better, 22 Feb 2007
I have found Hibernate In Action to be an indispensible guide when developing Hibernate persistence solutions, so I was eagerly awaiting the release of its successor.

Most developers will want to use standard JPA as much as possible for portability reasons, and only use Hibernate where absolutely necessary to use features not supported by JPA.
However this book fails to cleanly separate discussion of JPA from Hibernate, meaning that if you take this approach to using JPA you end up wading through large sections of the 800+ pages of this weighty tome.

I have to agree with Ganeshji and C. Updike - this lack of any clean separation of JPA and Hibernate makes it difficult to get useful information out of the book.

This is a shame, as the writing is of a high standard - unfortunately the content is very poorly organised.

The best book in circulation on Hibernate , 18 Oct 2008
I was new to Hibernate when I finally decided to buy this book. I must say it has been a pleasure reading it from first to last page. If one wants to become very proficient at hibernate, I strongly recommend this book. Not only it tells the reader everything there is to know about Hibernate (and I mean everything!) but it also presents both the Hibernate world and the JPA world. Obviously the HB world provides much more functionalities than the JPA, but then the JPA is only in its first release and many of the functionalities today provided by HB will be available in JPA. By the end of this book you'll be able to work proficiently on HB and address also advanced issues such as performance optimisation (with 1st and 2nd level caches), reporting queries, design and testing patterns.

Awesome book. Deceptive title., 23 May 2008
For me a more apt title would have been: "ORM with Hibernate and EJB3".

This book conveys loads of excellent information.

There is a great Domain Model "Caveat Emptor" that is used as backdrop for the bulk of the book based upon an auction system to convey the intricacies of the technologies.

* Part 1 (about 150 pages) is more example orientated and shows how to use Ant tasks to turn Java entities annotated with meta-data or in association with XML to DDL/SQL and vice-versa.
* The next 540 pages (Part 2 & first section of Part 3) make up the bulk of the book. This part is more of a reference. This material is very informative, but a bit of a slog,
heavy going and dry at times. Quite taxing on the old brain!
The format generally the following pattern:
-> The Hibernate way of doing things. Sometimes with XML. Sometimes with annotations.
-> The EJB3 way.
-> How Hibernate can compliment EJB3 and sometimes vice-versa.
-> A summation highlighting two technologies.
* The last two chapters of Part 3 (next 200 pages) are awesome and what make the book really shine.
They return to a more easy to understand example driven format and tie everything together.
The penultimate chapter has a good discussion on architectural concerns. (Unfortunately you ought to plough through the detailed reference section to best understand everything).
There is also an interesting introduction to TestNG.
* The last chapter goes on to demonstrate Seam. As a framework it overcomes some of the pitfalls of JSF. It has definately sparked my interest in learning more about Seam
and rekindled my interest in JSF.
* On a final note. It's also a great SQL reference to boot.
Great job Christian and Gavin!

Too much., 13 Nov 2007
I've recently been reading Java Persistence with Hibernate, having had limited experience with Hibernate previously. My thinking was that a book this size should provide a really gentle but complete coverage.

After 5 months, I had got as far as Chapter 7. Normally, I fly through books, but there was something about this one that just didn't work for me. I don't like 'giving up', but by chapter 7 I asked myself honestly a) was I enjoying it and b) was I learning, and I came to 'no' for both.

The book (as we know) was written by the authors of Hibernate, and to this end they know it inside out. However, this is also their weakness. Instead of giving me what I needed - an overview, followed by some good examples that I could follow and learn from, they would show me one way to do something in Hibernate, then in annotations, then with JPA xml, then with JPA annotations except for the bits that couldn't be reached and so had to use Hibernate annotations. Then they would give me a reason/situation when this approach couldn't be used, and the process would start over with a new technique. As a reference, this is excellent. As a learning book, it's a nightmare, so much so that I've stopped reading.

The definitive hibernate reference, 14 Sep 2007
If you are going to buy a book about how to use Hibernate, this is the one to get.

It has in depth coverage of native Hibernate, JPA (just because JPA is a standard doesn't make it evil) and the Hibernate implementation of JPA. It also covers the issues surrounding object/relational mapping and various "architectural" options for using persistent objects in an application.

It's a big book - it needs to be, it covers a lot of ground and contains a lot of detail. I'd go for the PDF version, it weighs less and you can use the PDF reader to search the text.

Could have been so much better, 22 Feb 2007
I have found Hibernate In Action to be an indispensible guide when developing Hibernate persistence solutions, so I was eagerly awaiting the release of its successor.

Most developers will want to use standard JPA as much as possible for portability reasons, and only use Hibernate where absolutely necessary to use features not supported by JPA.
However this book fails to cleanly separate discussion of JPA from Hibernate, meaning that if you take this approach to using JPA you end up wading through large sections of the 800+ pages of this weighty tome.

I have to agree with Ganeshji and C. Updike - this lack of any clean separation of JPA and Hibernate makes it difficult to get useful information out of the book.

This is a shame, as the writing is of a high standard - unfortunately the content is very poorly organised.

Does Exactly What It Says On The Tin, 14 May 2008
A few pages past the table of contents, I had solved two issues that had been bugging me since my last install. It was pretty minor stuff, but could I as heck find the answers online. It just shows what research, presentation, and quality control can achieve. So, another score for books over bytes.

The layout is uncluttered, and you can usually get the gist without reading through pages of preamble and exposition. The examples are practical and adaptable (no long and complex routines found on some sites) so they can almost be cut and pasted into your own applications. As your applications develop, there's always something else you can add.

The only downside is that it's a book - a few mods to MySQL and you might have to fork out for the next revision. Still, I should have got my money's worth by then.

Teaches you SQL, 31 Mar 2006
Explains by example so many common queries you'll be able to solve a wide variety of problems instantly. SQL is a deceptively deep language and getting to grips with this small army of queries gives you the basics to build on.

Easy reading and sensible examples. Some omissions (insert) but it's not the complex stuff - that part is really taught well.

As many Java developers and IS managers already know, Sun's powerful Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) technology offers an attractive option for developing server-side components. A suitable read for both managers and Java programmers, Enterprise JavaBeans provides a surprisingly clear and engaging introduction to designing and programming with EJBs.

The tour of the EJB component model presented here centres on several beans created and tested for a travel reservation system in a fictitious cruise ship company. The samples are just right in scale, large enough to test out key concepts in design and deployment, but small enough to be comprehensible, even to those who are not Java experts. The author pays good attention to the real-world issues of deployment with EJBs (as well as the differences between vendors application servers which run them).

While there are enough details in Java syntax for designing both entity and session beans for the developer, sections on design here will please those who manage projects without delving much into code. Later, the author shows off choices for designing entity and session beans. (For instance, entity beans can allow their "bean containers" to handle the details of connecting to a database, or they can do it themselves. This book demonstrates both approaches.) When it comes to session beans (which "wire" together entity beans to do real work), the author's introduction to managing state and transactions is also a stand-out. Tips for performance and reusability close out the book.

In all, Enterprise JavaBeans provides an engaging tour of one of the most promising component technologies. It's technically astute, but thoroughly approachable too, and can serve the needs of any manager or Java developer considering EJBs for future projects. --Richard Dragan, Amazon.com

Topics covered: Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) basics, distributed architectures, Component Transaction Monitors (CTM's), bean-containers, home and remote bean interfaces, resource management, configuring EJB servers, entity beans, JNDI, container-managed and bean-managed persistence, session beans, stateless and stateful beans, transactions, design and performance hints.

The best book in circulation on Hibernate , 18 Oct 2008
I was new to Hibernate when I finally decided to buy this book. I must say it has been a pleasure reading it from first to last page. If one wants to become very proficient at hibernate, I strongly recommend this book. Not only it tells the reader everything there is to know about Hibernate (and I mean everything!) but it also presents both the Hibernate world and the JPA world. Obviously the HB world provides much more functionalities than the JPA, but then the JPA is only in its first release and many of the functionalities today provided by HB will be available in JPA. By the end of this book you'll be able to work proficiently on HB and address also advanced issues such as performance optimisation (with 1st and 2nd level caches), reporting queries, design and testing patterns.

Awesome book. Deceptive title., 23 May 2008
For me a more apt title would have been: "ORM with Hibernate and EJB3".

This book conveys loads of excellent information.

There is a great Domain Model "Caveat Emptor" that is used as backdrop for the bulk of the book based upon an auction system to convey the intricacies of the technologies.

* Part 1 (about 150 pages) is more example orientated and shows how to use Ant tasks to turn Java entities annotated with meta-data or in association with XML to DDL/SQL and vice-versa.
* The next 540 pages (Part 2 & first section of Part 3) make up the bulk of the book. This part is more of a reference. This material is very informative, but a bit of a slog,
heavy going and dry at times. Quite taxing on the old brain!
The format generally the following pattern:
-> The Hibernate way of doing things. Sometimes with XML. Sometimes with annotations.
-> The EJB3 way.
-> How Hibernate can compliment EJB3 and sometimes vice-versa.
-> A summation highlighting two technologies.
* The last two chapters of Part 3 (next 200 pages) are awesome and what make the book really shine.
They return to a more easy to understand example driven format and tie everything together.
The penultimate chapter has a good discussion on architectural concerns. (Unfortunately you ought to plough through the detailed reference section to best understand everything).
There is also an interesting introduction to TestNG.
* The last chapter goes on to demonstrate Seam. As a framework it overcomes some of the pitfalls of JSF. It has definately sparked my interest in learning more about Seam
and rekindled my interest in JSF.
* On a final note. It's also a great SQL reference to boot.
Great job Christian and Gavin!

Too much., 13 Nov 2007
I've recently been reading Java Persistence with Hibernate, having had limited experience with Hibernate previously. My thinking was that a book this size should provide a really gentle but complete coverage.

After 5 months, I had got as far as Chapter 7. Normally, I fly through books, but there was something about this one that just didn't work for me. I don't like 'giving up', but by chapter 7 I asked myself honestly a) was I enjoying it and b) was I learning, and I came to 'no' for both.

The book (as we know) was written by the authors of Hibernate, and to this end they know it inside out. However, this is also their weakness. Instead of giving me what I needed - an overview, followed by some good examples that I could follow and learn from, they would show me one way to do something in Hibernate, then in annotations, then with JPA xml, then with JPA annotations except for the bits that couldn't be reached and so had to use Hibernate annotations. Then they would give me a reason/situation when this approach couldn't be used, and the process would start over with a new technique. As a reference, this is excellent. As a learning book, it's a nightmare, so much so that I've stopped reading.

The definitive hibernate reference, 14 Sep 2007
If you are going to buy a book about how to use Hibernate, this is the one to get.

It has in depth coverage of native Hibernate, JPA (just because JPA is a standard doesn't make it evil) and the Hibernate implementation of JPA. It also covers the issues surrounding object/relational mapping and various "architectural" options for using persistent objects in an application.

It's a big book - it needs to be, it covers a lot of ground and contains a lot of detail. I'd go for the PDF version, it weighs less and you can use the PDF reader to search the text.

Could have been so much better, 22 Feb 2007
I have found Hibernate In Action to be an indispensible guide when developing Hibernate persistence solutions, so I was eagerly awaiting the release of its successor.

Most developers will want to use standard JPA as much as possible for portability reasons, and only use Hibernate where absolutely necessary to use features not supported by JPA.
However this book fails to cleanly separate discussion of JPA from Hibernate, meaning that if you take this approach to using JPA you end up wading through large sections of the 800+ pages of this weighty tome.

I have to agree with Ganeshji and C. Updike - this lack of any clean separation of JPA and Hibernate makes it difficult to get useful information out of the book.

This is a shame, as the writing is of a high standard - unfortunately the content is very poorly organised.

Does Exactly What It Says On The Tin, 14 May 2008
A few pages past the table of contents, I had solved two issues that had been bugging me since my last install. It was pretty minor stuff, but could I as heck find the answers online. It just shows what research, presentation, and quality control can achieve. So, another score for books over bytes.

The layout is uncluttered, and you can usually get the gist without reading through pages of preamble and exposition. The examples are practical and adaptable (no long and complex routines found on some sites) so they can almost be cut and pasted into your own applications. As your applications develop, there's always something else you can add.

The only downside is that it's a book - a few mods to MySQL and you might have to fork out for the next revision. Still, I should have got my money's worth by then.

Teaches you SQL, 31 Mar 2006
Explains by example so many common queries you'll be able to solve a wide variety of problems instantly. SQL is a deceptively deep language and getting to grips with this small army of queries gives you the basics to build on.

Easy reading and sensible examples. Some omissions (insert) but it's not the complex stuff - that part is really taught well.

Not good for new programmers, 05 Aug 2008
Not impressed with this book.
Information is scattered all over the pages. Not arranged in order.
No explanation for diagrams.
Introduction itself is bit strange.


Comprehensive - read this and pass your SCBCD 5 for EJB3, 13 Jun 2008
This book is all you need to read if you want to know about EJB3, and it helpfully makes comparisons between EJB2 and EJB3 throughout the text.

If you read chapters 1 to 17 of this book, that's all you need to know to sit the Sun Certified Business Component Developer exam (JEE 5). I sat it this week and got 90%, using only this book and the Whizlabs mock exams as a reference.

The only down point of the book is that it must be read like a novel to really understand EJB3. It's not an easy lookup reference book, you can't just dip in and out of it. For example, different aspects of persistence contexts and transactions are featured in more than one chapter, which is why it is better that you read the book from start to finish. You won't need to read chapter 17 onwards unless you want to know about web services.

It might seem like a long haul but it is definitely worth spending the time reading this book.

Best EJB 3.0 book out there, 23 Apr 2008
I have a couple of EJB3.0 books but this one is pretty much the one that's permanently on my desk. It's a perfect reference for me now and was a great source of information while I was familiarizing myself with EJB3.0.

The workbooks are relatively informative as well even for readers that do not use JBoss (me being one of those people). The only minor issue I can think of is the limited Web Service coverage and the JPA sections are a little limited. That said the book's main focus is EJB3.0 and it covers extremely well.

I cannot recommend it enough.

Comprehensive, 17 Apr 2006
I found this book to be generally ok. The only problems I ran into is that it can be a little wooly at times, and the way the examples are setup can be a little confusing.

It really is a book for people with a good working knowledge of Java. You'll struggle if you don't already know what your doing. But equally, I was pleased with the way it thoroughly explains the tech behind EJB.

A good EJB 2.0 and 2.1 book, plus a good JBoss 4 workbook, 14 Nov 2004
This book, now at the fourth edition, is very well organized. First of all there is a good introduction to the primary services featured by the J2EE / EJB architecture, so you don't need to have a backgroud about this, but, obviously for every book of this kind, you need a strong know-how in enterprise programming. You cannot start to program in Java just reading this book.
The book was written across two release of the EJB specification: the 2.0 and the 2.1 (now we are waiting for the 3.0 with a lot of new characteristics, such as a lighter container) and the author is very efficient in readily signaling differences between he two releases.
Moreover the author is always very accurate in details description.
Probably, this kind of attention, put the author in the condition of being quite redundant, but I think is tipical of US books (I don't know if this could be a problem, just think the book could be lighter, reading sometimes going work by subway).
There is an interesting chapter about design (just an introduction) and another chapter about alternatives, such as Hinernate, and it's a good idea because you always need alternatives and seems that the author is not only an EJB evangelist.
Thare is not a bibliography and you need to follow also course, or just read a book, about J2EE/EJB best practices or patterns (I prefer best practices, even if less fashionable)
I think that the better idea that this book point out is the embedding of a second book: it includes a workbook that introduce the reader to the JBoss Application Server and helps him in the deployment and execution of the example using JBoss. The workbook is written by two JBoss "masters": they are Bill Burke, (do you know JBoss AOP ?) and Sacha Labourey (what about clustering features in JBoss ?). The two books are simply synchronized.

The best book in circulation on Hibernate , 18 Oct 2008
I was new to Hibernate when I finally decided to buy this book. I must say it has been a pleasure reading it from first to last page. If one wants to become very proficient at hibernate, I strongly recommend this book. Not only it tells the reader everything there is to know about Hibernate (and I mean everything!) but it also presents both the Hibernate world and the JPA world. Obviously the HB world provides much more functionalities than the JPA, but then the JPA is only in its first release and many of the functionalities today provided by HB will be available in JPA. By the end of this book you'll be able to work proficiently on HB and address also advanced issues such as performance optimisation (with 1st and 2nd level caches), reporting queries, design and testing patterns.

Awesome book. Deceptive title., 23 May 2008
For me a more apt title would have been: "ORM with Hibernate and EJB3".

This book conveys loads of excellent information.

There is a great Domain Model "Caveat Emptor" that is used as backdrop for the bulk of the book based upon an auction system to convey the intricacies of the technologies.

* Part 1 (about 150 pages) is more example orientated and shows how to use Ant tasks to turn Java entities annotated with meta-data or in association with XML to DDL/SQL and vice-versa.
* The next 540 pages (Part 2 & first section of Part 3) make up the bulk of the book. This part is more of a reference. This material is very informative, but a bit of a slog,
heavy going and dry at times. Quite taxing on the old brain!
The format generally the following pattern:
-> The Hibernate way of doing things. Sometimes with XML. Sometimes with annotations.
-> The EJB3 way.
-> How Hibernate can compliment EJB3 and sometimes vice-versa.
-> A summation highlighting two technologies.
* The last two chapters of Part 3 (next 200 pages) are awesome and what make the book really shine.
They return to a more easy to understand example driven format and tie everything together.
The penultimate chapter has a good discussion on architectural concerns. (Unfortunately you ought to plough through the detailed reference section to best understand everything).
There is also an interesting introduction to TestNG.
* The last chapter goes on to demonstrate Seam. As a framework it overcomes some of the pitfalls of JSF. It has definately sparked my interest in learning more about Seam
and rekindled my interest in JSF.
* On a final note. It's also a great SQL reference to boot.
Great job Christian and Gavin!

Too much., 13 Nov 2007
I've recently been reading Java Persistence with Hibernate, having had limited experience with Hibernate previously. My thinking was that a book this size should provide a really gentle but complete coverage.

After 5 months, I had got as far as Chapter 7. Normally, I fly through books, but there was something about this one that just didn't work for me. I don't like 'giving up', but by chapter 7 I asked myself honestly a) was I enjoying it and b) was I learning, and I came to 'no' for both.

The book (as we know) was written by the authors of Hibernate, and to this end they know it inside out. However, this is also their weakness. Instead of giving me what I needed - an overview, followed by some good examples that I could follow and learn from, they would show me one way to do something in Hibernate, then in annotations, then with JPA xml, then with JPA annotations except for the bits that couldn't be reached and so had to use Hibernate annotations. Then they would give me a reason/situation when this approach couldn't be used, and the process would start over with a new technique. As a reference, this is excellent. As a learning book, it's a nightmare, so much so that I've stopped reading.

The definitive hibernate reference, 14 Sep 2007
If you are going to buy a book about how to use Hibernate, this is the one to get.

It has in depth coverage of native Hibernate, JPA (just because JPA is a standard doesn't make it evil) and the Hibernate implementation of JPA. It also covers the issues surrounding object/relational mapping and various "architectural" options for using persistent objects in an application.

It's a big book - it needs to be, it covers a lot of ground and contains a lot of detail. I'd go for the PDF version, it weighs less and you can use the PDF reader to search the text.

Could have been so much better, 22 Feb 2007
I have found Hibernate In Action to be an indispensible guide when developing Hibernate persistence solutions, so I was eagerly awaiting the release of its successor.

Most developers will want to use standard JPA as much as possible for portability reasons, and only use Hibernate where absolutely necessary to use features not supported by JPA.
However this book fails to cleanly separate discussion of JPA from Hibernate, meaning that if you take this approach to using JPA you end up wading through large sections of the 800+ pages of this weighty tome.

I have to agree with Ganeshji and C. Updike - this lack of any clean separation of JPA and Hibernate makes it difficult to get useful information out of the book.

This is a shame, as the writing is of a high standard - unfortunately the content is very poorly organised.

Does Exactly What It Says On The Tin, 14 May 2008
A few pages past the table of contents, I had solved two issues that had been bugging me since my last install. It was pretty minor stuff, but could I as heck find the answers online. It just shows what research, presentation, and quality control can achieve. So, another score for books over bytes.

The layout is uncluttered, and you can usually get the gist without reading through pages of preamble and exposition. The examples are practical and adaptable (no long and complex routines found on some sites) so they can almost be cut and pasted into your own applications. As your applications develop, there's always something else you can add.

The only downside is that it's a book - a few mods to MySQL and you might have to fork out for the next revision. Still, I should have got my money's worth by then.

Teaches you SQL, 31 Mar 2006
Explains by example so many common queries you'll be able to solve a wide variety of problems instantly. SQL is a deceptively deep language and getting to grips with this small army of queries gives you the basics to build on.

Easy reading and sensible examples. Some omissions (insert) but it's not the complex stuff - that part is really taught well.

Not good for new programmers, 05 Aug 2008
Not impressed with this book.
Information is scattered all over the pages. Not arranged in order.
No explanation for diagrams.
Introduction itself is bit strange.


Comprehensive - read this and pass your SCBCD 5 for EJB3, 13 Jun 2008
This book is all you need to read if you want to know about EJB3, and it helpfully makes comparisons between EJB2 and EJB3 throughout the text.

If you read chapters 1 to 17 of this book, that's all you need to know to sit the Sun Certified Business Component Developer exam (JEE 5). I sat it this week and got 90%, using only this book and the Whizlabs mock exams as a reference.

The only down point of the book is that it must be read like a novel to really understand EJB3. It's not an easy lookup reference book, you can't just dip in and out of it. For example, different aspects of persistence contexts and transactions are featured in more than one chapter, which is why it is better that you read the book from start to finish. You won't need to read chapter 17 onwards unless you want to know about web services.

It might seem like a long haul but it is definitely worth spending the time reading this book.

Best EJB 3.0 book out there, 23 Apr 2008
I have a couple of EJB3.0 books but this one is pretty much the one that's permanently on my desk. It's a perfect reference for me now and was a great source of information while I was familiarizing myself with EJB3.0.

The workbooks are relatively informative as well even for readers that do not use JBoss (me being one of those people). The only minor issue I can think of is the limited Web Service coverage and the JPA sections are a little limited. That said the book's main focus is EJB3.0 and it covers extremely well.

I cannot recommend it enough.

Comprehensive, 17 Apr 2006
I found this book to be generally ok. The only problems I ran into is that it can be a little wooly at times, and the way the examples are setup can be a little confusing.

It really is a book for people with a good working knowledge of Java. You'll struggle if you don't already know what your doing. But equally, I was pleased with the way it thoroughly explains the tech behind EJB.

A good EJB 2.0 and 2.1 book, plus a good JBoss 4 workbook, 14 Nov 2004
This book, now at the fourth edition, is very well organized. First of all there is a good introduction to the primary services featured by the J2EE / EJB architecture, so you don't need to have a backgroud about this, but, obviously for every book of this kind, you need a strong know-how in enterprise programming. You cannot start to program in Java just reading this book.
The book was written across two release of the EJB specification: the 2.0 and the 2.1 (now we are waiting for the 3.0 with a lot of new characteristics, such as a lighter container) and the author is very efficient in readily signaling differences between he two releases.
Moreover the author is always very accurate in details description.
Probably, this kind of attention, put the author in the condition of being quite redundant, but I think is tipical of US books (I don't know if this could be a problem, just think the book could be lighter, reading sometimes going work by subway).
There is an interesting chapter about design (just an introduction) and another chapter about alternatives, such as Hinernate, and it's a good idea because you always need alternatives and seems that the author is not only an EJB evangelist.
Thare is not a bibliography and you need to follow also course, or just read a book, about J2EE/EJB best practices or patterns (I prefer best practices, even if less fashionable)
I think that the better idea that this book point out is the embedding of a second book: it includes a workbook that introduce the reader to the JBoss Application Server and helps him in the deployment and execution of the example using JBoss. The workbook is written by two JBoss "masters": they are Bill Burke, (do you know JBoss AOP ?) and Sacha Labourey (what about clustering features in JBoss ?). The two books are simply synchronized.

Very good but a missed opportunity, 17 Oct 2008
This was one of a couple of PHP books that I bought at the same time. This one is getting dog-eared, the other is gathering dust. The book's main aim is to take the reader from beginner to being able to develop a database driven website.

The chosen project - an on-line photo gallery - happened to be sufficiently close to what I was looking to develop myself, so learning and code to copy/modify in one.

By and large the book achieves its aims but misses one or two tricks along the way. The first is security - this is mentioned in one of the final chapters but it would have been better if some simple techniques such as input filtering had been introduced early on along with the reasoning behind them.

Tying PHP to MySQL is the theme of the second part of the book and three approaches are used: the original MySQL extension; MySQLi and PDO. This leads to the second missed opportunity. The code for all three approaches is directly embedded in the HTML, it would have been nice to see an API developed to hide the actual implementation in use. The author's follow on book "PHP: OOP Solutions" does move the code into wrapper functions which effectively abstracts the underlying data model from the presentation.

Despite the above reservations, this book is well worth getting.

This book really made sense-- I am finally starting to feel like a programmer!!, 03 Oct 2008
What a great book, after reading many different books on PHP i never felt confident enough to think for myself. That was until i read this book, each chapter is split up into manageable chucks where you can really apply what you are reading into your own website design. The author users a sample site with a little css and html and applies php to this so you can really see the impact of what is going on. With other books they shown you the php but i found it difficult to apply this to the design of my a site. This books incorporates all three, the php and a little css and html(although a you need to understand html and css as it does not explain these just gives you the code)

Even if you dont fully understand an exercise you can still complete it by following the code to see the outcome. And when i needed that particularly function on my own site after reading over it again it made perfect sense.

After reading this book i am now well on my way to developing a dynamic website with a CMS, i just want to say a big thank you to the author for making this possible.

The only thing that i would want different in this book is more of it as every chapter taught me some really useful PHP.





EXCELLENT STARTING POINT - USE IT TODAY, 27 Mar 2008
I have just received this book today and by this evening I have setup secure webpages - understand including scripts and pages to save time developing, created a contact form which emails me and the customer. Wow, it really doesn't get much easier than this - everything is explained, security is a major point and all options seem to be covered.

A must! even has a website with latest updates and corrections.

Very good book, 12 Feb 2008
I bought this book in December 2006. I bought other books in Php. However, none of them were as good as Php solutions. I agree with the previous comments that is not a bed time book but more an exercise book with very good and useful tutorials. In addition, a good understanding in HTML is expected from the start as stated in the introduction. Most of the tutorials were incoporated into the two websites that I maintained. I still use this book when I got stuck for example when I created an intention to rejoin online form for a sailing club.
One fundamental good point of this book is that the examples are written on classic and advanced PHP. Not all the hosts allow advanced PHP when dealing with database.
I have not given full mark because, although one of the best, it is not perfect. There are a few typos although the amendum are online and are minor. The tutorials synthax could also be improved.
Saying all that, I strongly recommend this book.

An absolute must, 01 Feb 2008
I work with php and mysql every day and i find this book completely invaluable. It is very well written and easy to read and includes lots and lots of useful information and best pratice issues.
As well as lots and lots of secure and useful code, it incorporates enough information for you to be able to create complex and simple web applications without breaking into a sweat. I highly reccommend this book to anyone wanting to learn how to write dynamic web applications, i have hundreds of these books, and this is by far my favourite.
Once you have mastered the concepts in this book, you may need something more techinical and in depth, but for beginners and those with some skill this book will not dissappoint.

The best book in circulation on Hibernate , 18 Oct 2008
I was new to Hibernate when I finally decided to buy this book. I must say it has been a pleasure reading it from first to last page. If one wants to become very proficient at hibernate, I strongly recommend this book. Not only it tells the reader everything there is to know about Hibernate (and I mean everything!) but it also presents both the Hibernate world and the JPA world. Obviously the HB world provides much more functionalities than the JPA, but then the JPA is only in its first release and many of the functionalities today provided by HB will be available in JPA. By the end of this book you'll be able to work proficiently on HB and address also advanced issues such as performance optimisation (with 1st and 2nd level caches), reporting queries, design and testing patterns.

Awesome book. Deceptive title., 23 May 2008
For me a more apt title would have been: "ORM with Hibernate and EJB3".

This book conveys loads of excellent information.

There is a great Domain Model "Caveat Emptor" that is used as backdrop for the bulk of the book based upon an auction system to convey the intricacies of the technologies.

* Part 1 (about 150 pages) is more example orientated and shows how to use Ant tasks to turn Java entities annotated with meta-data or in association with XML to DDL/SQL and vice-versa.
* The next 540 pages (Part 2 & first section of Part 3) make up the bulk of the book. This part is more of a reference. This material is very informative, but a bit of a slog,
heavy going and dry at times. Quite taxing on the old brain!
The format generally the following pattern:
-> The Hibernate way of doing things. Sometimes with XML. Sometimes with annotations.
-> The EJB3 way.
-> How Hibernate can compliment EJB3 and sometimes vice-versa.
-> A summation highlighting two technologies.
* The last two chapters of Part 3 (next 200 pages) are awesome and what make the book really shine.
They return to a more easy to understand example driven format and tie everything together.
The penultimate chapter has a good discussion on architectural concerns. (Unfortunately you ought to plough through the detailed reference section to best understand everything).
There is also an interesting introduction to TestNG.
* The last chapter goes on to demonstrate Seam. As a framework it overcomes some of the pitfalls of JSF. It has definately sparked my interest in learning more about Seam
and rekindled my interest in JSF.
* On a final note. It's also a great SQL reference to boot.
Great job Christian and Gavin!

Too much., 13 Nov 2007
I've recently been reading Java Persistence with Hibernate, having had limited experience with Hibernate previously. My thinking was that a book this size should provide a really gentle but complete coverage.

After 5 months, I had got as far as Chapter 7. Normally, I fly through books, but there was something about this one that just didn't work for me. I don't like 'giving up', but by chapter 7 I asked myself honestly a) was I enjoying it and b) was I learning, and I came to 'no' for both.

The book (as we know) was written by the authors of Hibernate, and to this end they know it inside out. However, this is also their weakness. Instead of giving me what I needed - an overview, followed by some good examples that I could follow and learn from, they would show me one way to do something in Hibernate, then in annotations, then with JPA xml, then with JPA annotations except for the bits that couldn't be reached and so had to use Hibernate annotations. Then they would give me a reason/situation when this approach couldn't be used, and the process would start over with a new technique. As a reference, this is excellent. As a learning book, it's a nightmare, so much so that I've stopped reading.

The definitive hibernate reference, 14 Sep 2007
If you are going to buy a book about how to use Hibernate, this is the one to get.

It has in depth coverage of native Hibernate, JPA (just because JPA is a standard doesn't make it evil) and the Hibernate implementation of JPA. It also covers the issues surrounding object/relational mapping and various "architectural" options for using persistent objects in an application.

It's a big book - it needs to be, it covers a lot of ground and contains a lot of detail. I'd go for the PDF version, it weighs less and you can use the PDF reader to search the text.

Could have been so much better, 22 Feb 2007
I have found Hibernate In Action to be an indispensible guide when developing Hibernate persistence solutions, so I was eagerly awaiting the release of its successor.

Most developers will want to use standard JPA as much as possible for portability reasons, and only use Hibernate where absolutely necessary to use features not supported by JPA.
However this book fails to cleanly separate discussion of JPA from Hibernate, meaning that if you take this approach to using JPA you end up wading through large sections of the 800+ pages of this weighty tome.

I have to agree with Ganeshji and C. Updike - this lack of any clean separation of JPA and Hibernate makes it difficult to get useful information out of the book.

This is a shame, as the writing is of a high standard - unfortunately the content is very poorly organised.

Does Exactly What It Says On The Tin, 14 May 2008
A few pages past the table of contents, I had solved two issues that had been bugging me since my last install. It was pretty minor stuff, but could I as heck find the answers online. It just shows what research, presentation, and quality control can achieve. So, another score for books over bytes.

The layout is uncluttered, and you can usually get the gist without reading through pages of preamble and exposition. The examples are practical and adaptable (no long and complex routines found on some sites) so they can almost be cut and pasted into your own applications. As your applications develop, there's always something else you can add.

The only downside is that it's a book - a few mods to MySQL and you might have to fork out for the next revision. Still, I should have got my money's worth by then.

Teaches you SQL, 31 Mar 2006
Explains by example so many common queries you'll be able to solve a wide variety of problems instantly. SQL is a deceptively deep language and getting to grips with this small army of queries gives you the basics to build on.

Easy reading and sensible examples. Some omissions (insert) but it's not the complex stuff - that part is really taught well.

Not good for new programmers, 05 Aug 2008
Not impressed with this book.
Information is scattered all over the pages. Not arranged in order.
No explanation for diagrams.
Introduction itself is bit strange.


Comprehensive - read this and pass your SCBCD 5 for EJB3, 13 Jun 2008
This book is all you need to read if you want to know about EJB3, and it helpfully makes comparisons between EJB2 and EJB3 throughout the text.

If you read chapters 1 to 17 of this book, that's all you need to know to sit the Sun Certified Business Component Developer exam (JEE 5). I sat it this week and got 90%, using only this book and the Whizlabs mock exams as a reference.

The only down point of the book is that it must be read like a novel to really understand EJB3. It's not an easy lookup reference book, you can't just dip in and out of it. For example, different aspects of persistence contexts and transactions are featured in more than one chapter, which is why it is better that you read the book from start to finish. You won't need to read chapter 17 onwards unless you want to know about web services.

It might seem like a long haul but it is definitely worth spending the time reading this book.

Best EJB 3.0 book out there, 23 Apr 2008
I have a couple of EJB3.0 books but this one is pretty much the one that's permanently on my desk. It's a perfect reference for me now and was a great source of information while I was familiarizing myself with EJB3.0.

The workbooks are relatively informative as well even for readers that do not use JBoss (me being one of those people). The only minor issue I can think of is the limited Web Service coverage and the JPA sections are a little limited. That said the book's main focus is EJB3.0 and it covers extremely well.

I cannot recommend it enough.

Comprehensive, 17 Apr 2006
I found this book to be generally ok. The only problems I ran into is that it can be a little wooly at times, and the way the examples are setup can be a little confusing.

It really is a book for people with a good working knowledge of Java. You'll struggle if you don't already know what your doing. But equally, I was pleased with the way it thoroughly explains the tech behind EJB.

A good EJB 2.0 and 2.1 book, plus a good JBoss 4 workbook, 14 Nov 2004
This book, now at the fourth edition, is very well organized. First of all there is a good introduction to the primary services featured by the J2EE / EJB architecture, so you don't need to have a backgroud about this, but, obviously for every book of this kind, you need a strong know-how in enterprise programming. You cannot start to program in Java just reading this book.
The book was written across two release of the EJB specification: the 2.0 and the 2.1 (now we are waiting for the 3.0 with a lot of new characteristics, such as a lighter container) and the author is very efficient in readily signaling differences between he two releases.
Moreover the author is always very accurate in details description.
Probably, this kind of attention, put the author in the condition of being quite redundant, but I think is tipical of US books (I don't know if this could be a problem, just think the book could be lighter, reading sometimes going work by subway).
There is an interesting chapter about design (just an introduction) and another chapter about alternatives, such as Hinernate, and it's a good idea because you always need alternatives and seems that the author is not only an EJB evangelist.
Thare is not a bibliography and you need to follow also course, or just read a book, about J2EE/EJB best practices or patterns (I prefer best practices, even if less fashionable)
I think that the better idea that this book point out is the embedding of a second book: it includes a workbook that introduce the reader to the JBoss Application Server and helps him in the deployment and execution of the example using JBoss. The workbook is written by two JBoss "masters": they are Bill Burke, (do you know JBoss AOP ?) and Sacha Labourey (what about clustering features in JBoss ?). The two books are simply synchronized.

Very good but a missed opportunity, 17 Oct 2008
This was one of a couple of PHP books that I bought at the same time. This one is getting dog-eared, the other is gathering dust. The book's main aim is to take the reader from beginner to being able to develop a database driven website.

The chosen project - an on-line photo gallery - happened to be sufficiently close to what I was looking to develop myself, so learning and code to copy/modify in one.

By and large the book achieves its aims but misses one or two tricks along the way. The first is security - this is mentioned in one of the final chapters but it would have been better if some simple techniques such as input filtering had been introduced early on along with the reasoning behind them.

Tying PHP to MySQL is the theme of the second part of the book and three approaches are used: the original MySQL extension; MySQLi and PDO. This leads to the second missed opportunity. The code for all three approaches is directly embedded in the HTML, it would have been nice to see an API developed to hide the actual implementation in use. The author's follow on book "PHP: OOP Solutions" does move the code into wrapper functions which effectively abstracts the underlying data model from the presentation.

Despite the above reservations, this book is well worth getting.

This book really made sense-- I am finally starting to feel like a programmer!!, 03 Oct 2008
What a great book, after reading many different books on PHP i never felt confident enough to think for myself. That was until i read this book, each chapter is split up into manageable chucks where you can really apply what you are reading into your own website design. The author users a sample site with a little css and html and applies php to this so you can really see the impact of what is going on. With other books they shown you the php but i found it difficult to apply this to the design of my a site. This books incorporates all three, the php and a little css and html(although a you need to understand html and css as it does not explain these just gives you the code)

Even if you dont fully understand an exercise you can still complete it by following the code to see the outcome. And when i needed that particularly function on my own site after reading over it again it made perfect sense.

After reading this book i am now well on my way to developing a dynamic website with a CMS, i just want to say a big thank you to the author for making this possible.

The only thing that i would want different in this book is more of it as every chapter taught me some really useful PHP.





EXCELLENT STARTING POINT - USE IT TODAY, 27 Mar 2008
I have just received this book today and by this evening I have setup secure webpages - understand including scripts and pages to save time developing, created a contact form which emails me and the customer. Wow, it really doesn't get much easier than this - everything is explained, security is a major point and all options seem to be covered.

A must! even has a website with latest updates and corrections.

Very good book, 12 Feb 2008
I bought this book in December 2006. I bought other books in Php. However, none of them were as good as Php solutions. I agree with the previous comments that is not a bed time book but more an exercise book with very good and useful tutorials. In addition, a good understanding in HTML is expected from the start as stated in the introduction. Most of the tutorials were incoporated into the two websites that I maintained. I still use this book when I got stuck for example when I created an intention to rejoin online form for a sailing club.
One fundamental good point of this book is that the examples are written on classic and advanced PHP. Not all the hosts allow advanced PHP when dealing with database.
I have not given full mark because, although one of the best, it is not perfect. There are a few typos although the amendum are online and are minor. The tutorials synthax could also be improved.
Saying all that, I strongly recommend this book.

An absolute must, 01 Feb 2008
I work with php and mysql every day and i find this book completely invaluable. It is very well written and easy to read and includes lots and lots of useful information and best pratice issues.
As well as lots and lots of secure and useful code, it incorporates enough information for you to be able to create complex and simple web applications without breaking into a sweat. I highly reccommend this book to anyone wanting to learn how to write dynamic web applications, i have hundreds of these books, and this is by far my favourite.
Once you have mastered the concepts in this book, you may need something more techinical and in depth, but for beginners and those with some skill this book will not dissappoint.


Cracking stuff, 19 Jul 2007
Whatever you think about the merits of Groovy as a language, a serious contender on the JVM, or a complete mess, you couldn't hope to find a better advocate for Groovy than this book.

One of the secrets of GinA's success is that it assumes the reader is already proficient with Java development, including Swing, Ant and JUnit. It would also help to know about XML, SQL, HTML, JSP and a vague idea of how MVC applies to web apps. You don't need to be an expert in these areas, though. If you've sufficient knowledge to decode the preceeding alphabet soup of initialisations, you'll be ok.

The reward for possessing this background knowledge is that GinA doesn't waste time with trivial examples, and barrels through Groovy the language in the first part, leveraging your existing knowledge of Java to highlight the important differences in Groovy. In particular, the advantages of interpolating strings, simple hash and array construction syntax, optional typing and metaprogramming are stressed. The big win in Groovy over Java is the use of closures and their used in a block-based approach to iteration, which is as well motivated here as the material in, say, The Pickaxe is for Ruby.

The second part of the book provides examples of the Groovy library. It begins with an excellent chapter on Groovy's Builders, which provide a very neat, uncluttered syntax for putting together hierarchical structures. An obvious application is XML, and by extension Ant scripts, which appears to have some major advantages compared to the challenging readability of vanilla Ant. Even more impressive is the SwingBuilder example, which builds a GUI with the minimum of fuss and a complete lack of anonymous inner classes.

Beyond the Builders, there are also compelling chapters on templating HTML and server side Groovy (Groovlets), writing DAOs and DTOs in Groovy to simplify database programming, and a chapter on XML, which even manages to find the space to introduce Groovy for SOAP, XML-RPC and REST web services.

The final part of the book describes some non-core libraries and other applications of Groovy. The chapter on Groovy extensions to JUnit is interesting, although perhaps this is one place where it assumes too little on behalf of the reader. I would have assumed that the average developer sufficiently motivated to pick up a book on Groovy knows enough about unit testing and JUnit that more space could have been given to the advanced topics. Particularly appealing is the idea of testing Java code with dynamically typed Groovy unit tests, which would make mocking and stubbing more palatable; I would have liked more on that subject.

Another noteworthy chapter is the last one, which introduces the web app framework Grails. This has a different style to the other chapters, being a dialogue between two of the authors as they build a simple app. This reader admits to finding it a little bit naff, but it does usefully demonstrate the grails way (which is a lot like Rails).

If you have the slightest interest in Groovy, alternatives to Java on the JVM, or dynamic languages, GinA makes the perfect case for Groovy as a first class integration language for all the bits of Java where you really wish you were working with something like Perl, Ruby or Python. It's well-written, with good examples, clear explanations, and it's relentlessly practical, never forgetting its target audience. It's all the more impressive given lead author Dierk Konig's comment in the preface that English is not his first language. Kudos to him and his co-authors for what they've delivered.

One can only wish that every language had its GinA. Outstanding.

An excellent book for both old and new, 25 Apr 2007
The book is well presented, well written; moreover, the examples and instructions WORK. The authors have a very easy-going style, and you find yourself having a lot of fun (my favourite is the Grails example in the back, got me interested enough to rework a new project to use Grails+Groovy instead of my usual Delphi/PHP for web services).
The guys did an incredible job.

My only gripe (and the reason for the 4star rating); the Index is terrible.
Maybe it's just me, but if I'm looking for details on something specific (eg String Objects), I expect to get at least a bit of detail when I turn to the page identified in the index - instead of just finding the word String in italics on the page.
I'm not really familiar with how these things are done, but I would suggest fixing this in the next release of this book.

The best book in circulation on Hibernate , 18 Oct 2008
I was new to Hibernate when I finally decided to buy this book. I must say it has been a pleasure reading it from first to last page. If one wants to become very proficient at hibernate, I strongly recommend this book. Not only it tells the reader everything there is to know about Hibernate (and I mean everything!) but it also presents both the Hibernate world and the JPA world. Obviously the HB world provides much more functionalities than the JPA, but then the JPA is only in its first release and many of the functionalities today provided by HB will be available in JPA. By the end of this book you'll be able to work proficiently on HB and address also advanced issues such as performance optimisation (with 1st and 2nd level caches), reporting queries, design and testing patterns.

Awesome book. Deceptive title., 23 May 2008
For me a more apt title would have been: "ORM with Hibernate and EJB3".

This book conveys loads of excellent information.

There is a great Domain Model "Caveat Emptor" that is used as backdrop for the bulk of the book based upon an auction system to convey the intricacies of the technologies.

* Part 1 (about 150 pages) is more example orientated and shows how to use Ant tasks to turn Java entities annotated with meta-data or in association with XML to DDL/SQL and vice-versa.
* The next 540 pages (Part 2 & first section of Part 3) make up the bulk of the book. This part is more of a reference. This material is very informative, but a bit of a slog,
heavy going and dry at times. Quite taxing on the old brain!
The format generally the following pattern:
-> The Hibernate way of doing things. Sometimes with XML. Sometimes with annotations.
-> The EJB3 way.
-> How Hibernate can compliment EJB3 and sometimes vice-versa.
-> A summation highlighting two technologies.
* The last two chapters of Part 3 (next 200 pages) are awesome and what make the book really shine.
They return to a more easy to understand example driven format and tie everything together.
The penultimate chapter has a good discussion on architectural concerns. (Unfortunately you ought to plough through the detailed reference section to best understand everything).
There is also an interesting introduction to TestNG.
* The last chapter goes on to demonstrate Seam. As a framework it overcomes some of the pitfalls of JSF. It has definately sparked my interest in learning more about Seam
and rekindled my interest in JSF.
* On a final note. It's also a great SQL reference to boot.
Great job Christian and Gavin!

Too much., 13 Nov 2007
I've recently been reading Java Persistence with Hibernate, having had limited experience with Hibernate previously. My thinking was that a book this size should provide a really gentle but complete coverage.

After 5 months, I had got as far as Chapter 7. Normally, I fly through books, but there was something about this one that just didn't work for me. I don't like 'giving up', but by chapter 7 I asked myself honestly a) was I enjoying it and b) was I learning, and I came to 'no' for both.

The book (as we know) was written by the authors of Hibernate, and to this end they know it inside out. However, this is also their weakness. Instead of giving me what I needed - an overview, followed by some good examples that I could follow and learn from, they would show me one way to do something in Hibernate, then in annotations, then with JPA xml, then with JPA annotations except for the bits that couldn't be reached and so had to use Hibernate annotations. Then they would give me a reason/situation when this approach couldn't be used, and the process would start over with a new technique. As a reference, this is excellent. As a learning book, it's a nightmare, so much so that I've stopped reading.

The definitive hibernate reference, 14 Sep 2007
If you are going to buy a book about how to use Hibernate, this is the one to get.

It has in depth coverage of native Hibernate, JPA (just because JPA is a standard doesn't make it evil) and the Hibernate implementation of JPA. It also covers the issues surrounding object/relational mapping and various "architectural" options for using persistent objects in an application.

It's a big book - it needs to be, it covers a lot of ground and contains a lot of detail. I'd go for the PDF version, it weighs less and you can use the PDF reader to search the text.

Could have been so much better, 22 Feb 2007
I have found Hibernate In Action to be an indispensible guide when developing Hibernate persistence solutions, so I was eagerly awaiting the release of its successor.

Most developers will want to use standard JPA as much as possible for portability reasons, and only use Hibernate where absolutely necessary to use features not supported by JPA.
However this book fails to cleanly separate discussion of JPA from Hibernate, meaning that if you take this approach to using JPA you end up wading through large sections of the 800+ pages of this weighty tome.

I have to agree with Ganeshji and C. Updike - this lack of any clean separation of JPA and Hibernate makes it difficult to get useful information out of the book.

This is a shame, as the writing is of a high standard - unfortunately the content is very poorly organised.

Does Exactly What It Says On The Tin, 14 May 2008
A few pages past the table of contents, I had solved two issues that had been bugging me since my last install. It was pretty minor stuff, but could I as heck find the answers online. It just shows what research, presentation, and quality control can achieve. So, another score for books over bytes.

The layout is uncluttered, and you can usually get the gist without reading through pages of preamble and exposition. The examples are practical and adaptable (no long and complex routines found on some sites) so they can almost be cut and pasted into your own applications. As your applications develop, there's always something else you can add.

The only downside is that it's a book - a few mods to MySQL and you might have to fork out for the next revision. Still, I should have got my money's worth by then.

Teaches you SQL, 31 Mar 2006
Explains by example so many common queries you'll be able to solve a wide variety of problems instantly. SQL is a deceptively deep language and getting to grips with this small army of queries gives you the basics to build on.

Easy reading and sensible examples. Some omissions (insert) but it's not the complex stuff - that part is really taught well.

Not good for new programmers, 05 Aug 2008
Not impressed with this book.
Information is scattered all over the pages. Not arranged in order.
No explanation for diagrams.
Introduction itself is bit strange.


Comprehensive - read this and pass your SCBCD 5 for EJB3, 13 Jun 2008
This book is all you need to read if you want to know about EJB3, and it helpfully makes comparisons between EJB2 and EJB3 throughout the text.

If you read chapters 1 to 17 of this book, that's all you need to know to sit the Sun Certified Business Component Developer exam (JEE 5). I sat it this week and got 90%, using only this book and the Whizlabs mock exams as a reference.

The only down point of the book is that it must be read like a novel to really understand EJB3. It's not an easy lookup reference book, you can't just dip in and out of it. For example, different aspects of persistence contexts and transactions are featured in more than one chapter, which is why it is better that you read the book from start to finish. You won't need to read chapter 17 onwards unless you want to know about web services.

It might seem like a long haul but it is definitely worth spending the time reading this book.

Best EJB 3.0 book out there, 23 Apr 2008
I have a couple of EJB3.0 books but this one is pretty much the one that's permanently on my desk. It's a perfect reference for me now and was a great source of information while I was familiarizing myself with EJB3.0.

The workbooks are relatively informative as well even for readers that do not use JBoss (me being one of those people). The only minor issue I can think of is the limited Web Service coverage and the JPA sections are a little limited. That said the book's main focus is EJB3.0 and it covers extremely well.

I cannot recommend it enough.

Comprehensive, 17 Apr 2006
I found this book to be generally ok. The only problems I ran into is that it can be a little wooly at times, and the way the examples are setup can be a little confusing.

It really is a book for people with a good working knowledge of Java. You'll struggle if you don't already know what your doing. But equally, I was pleased with the way it thoroughly explains the tech behind EJB.

A good EJB 2.0 and 2.1 book, plus a good JBoss 4 workbook, 14 Nov 2004
This book, now at the fourth edition, is very well organized. First of all there is a good introduction to the primary services featured by the J2EE / EJB architecture, so you don't need to have a backgroud about this, but, obviously for every book of this kind, you need a strong know-how in enterprise programming. You cannot start to program in Java just reading this book.
The book was written across two release of the EJB specification: the 2.0 and the 2.1 (now we are waiting for the 3.0 with a lot of new characteristics, such as a lighter container) and the author is very efficient in readily signaling differences between he two releases.
Moreover the author is always very accurate in details description.
Probably, this kind of attention, put the author in the condition of being quite redundant, but I think is tipical of US books (I don't know if this could be a problem, just think the book could be lighter, reading sometimes going work by subway).
There is an interesting chapter about design (just an introduction) and another chapter about alternatives, such as Hinernate, and it's a good idea because you always need alternatives and seems that the author is not only an EJB evangelist.
Thare is not a bibliography and you need to follow also course, or just read a book, about J2EE/EJB best practices or patterns (I prefer best practices, even if less fashionable)
I think that the better idea that this book point out is the embedding of a second book: it includes a workbook that introduce the reader to the JBoss Application Server and helps him in the deployment and execution of the example using JBoss. The workbook is written by two JBoss "masters": they are Bill Burke, (do you know JBoss AOP ?) and Sacha Labourey (what about clustering features in JBoss ?). The two books are simply synchronized.

Very good but a missed opportunity, 17 Oct 2008
This was one of a couple of PHP books that I bought at the same time. This one is getting dog-eared, the other is gathering dust. The book's main aim is to take the reader from beginner to being able to develop a database driven website.

The chosen project - an on-line photo gallery - happened to be sufficiently close to what I was looking to develop myself, so learning and code to copy/modify in one.

By and large the book achieves its aims but misses one or two tricks along the way. The first is security - this is mentioned in one of the final chapters but it would have been better if some simple techniques such as input filtering had been introduced early on along with the reasoning behind them.

Tying PHP to MySQL is the theme of the second part of the book and three approaches are used: the original MySQL extension; MySQLi and PDO. This leads to the second missed opportunity. The code for all three approaches is directly embedded in the HTML, it would have been nice to see an API developed to hide the actual implementation in use. The author's follow on book "PHP: OOP Solutions" does move the code into wrapper functions which effectively abstracts the underlying data model from the presentation.

Despite the above reservations, this book is well worth getting.

This book really made sense-- I am finally starting to feel like a programmer!!, 03 Oct 2008
What a great book, after reading many different books on PHP i never felt confident enough to think for myself. That was until i read this book, each chapter is split up into manageable chucks where you can really apply what you are reading into your own website design. The author users a sample site with a little css and html and applies php to this so you can really see the impact of what is going on. With other books they shown you the php but i found it difficult to apply this to the design of my a site. This books incorporates all three, the php and a little css and html(although a you need to understand html and css as it does not explain these just gives you the code)

Even if you dont fully understand an exercise you can still complete it by following the code to see the outcome. And when i needed that particularly function on my own site after reading over it again it made perfect sense.

After reading this book i am now well on my way to developing a dynamic website with a CMS, i just want to say a big thank you to the author for making this possible.

The only thing that i would want different in this book is more of it as every chapter taught me some really useful PHP.





EXCELLENT STARTING POINT - USE IT TODAY, 27 Mar 2008
I have just received this book today and by this evening I have setup secure webpages - understand including scripts and pages to save time developing, created a contact form which emails me and the customer. Wow, it really doesn't get much easier than this - everything is explained, security is a major point and all options seem to be covered.

A must! even has a website with latest updates and corrections.

Very good book, 12 Feb 2008
I bought this book in December 2006. I bought other books in Php. However, none of them were as good as Php solutions. I agree with the previous comments that is not a bed time book but more an exercise book with very good and useful tutorials. In addition, a good understanding in HTML is expected from the start as stated in the introduction. Most of the tutorials were incoporated into the two websites that I maintained. I still use this book when I got stuck for example when I created an intention to rejoin online form for a sailing club.
One fundamental good point of this book is that the examples are written on classic and advanced PHP. Not all the hosts allow advanced PHP when dealing with database.
I have not given full mark because, although one of the best, it is not perfect. There are a few typos although the amendum are online and are minor. The tutorials synthax could also be improved.
Saying all that, I strongly recommend this book.

An absolute must, 01 Feb 2008
I work with php and mysql every day and i find this book completely invaluable. It is very well written and easy to read and includes lots and lots of useful information and best pratice issues.
As well as lots and lots of secure and useful code, it incorporates enough information for you to be able to create complex and simple web applications without breaking into a sweat. I highly reccommend this book to anyone wanting to learn how to write dynamic web applications, i have hundreds of these books, and this is by far my favourite.
Once you have mastered the concepts in this book, you may need something more techinical and in depth, but for beginners and those with some skill this book will not dissappoint.


Cracking stuff, 19 Jul 2007
Whatever you think about the merits of Groovy as a language, a serious contender on the JVM, or a complete mess, you couldn't hope to find a better advocate for Groovy than this book.

One of the secrets of GinA's success is that it assumes the reader is already proficient with Java development, including Swing, Ant and JUnit. It would also help to know about XML, SQL, HTML, JSP and a vague idea of how MVC applies to web apps. You don't need to be an expert in these areas, though. If you've sufficient knowledge to decode the preceeding alphabet soup of initialisations, you'll be ok.

The reward for possessing this background knowledge is that GinA doesn't waste time with trivial examples, and barrels through Groovy the language in the first part, leveraging your existing knowledge of Java to highlight the important differences in Groovy. In particular, the advantages of interpolating strings, simple hash and array construction syntax, optional typing and metaprogramming are stressed. The big win in Groovy over Java is the use of closures and their used in a block-based approach to iteration, which is as well motivated here as the material in, say, The Pickaxe is for Ruby.

The second part of the book provides examples of the Groovy library. It begins with an excellent chapter on Groovy's Builders, which provide a very neat, uncluttered syntax for putting together hierarchical structures. An obvious application is XML, and by extension Ant scripts, which appears to have some major advantages compared to the challenging readability of vanilla Ant. Even more impressive is the SwingBuilder example, which builds a GUI with the minimum of fuss and a complete lack of anonymous inner classes.

Beyond the Builders, there are also compelling chapters on templating HTML and server side Groovy (Groovlets), writing DAOs and DTOs in Groovy to simplify database programming, and a chapter on XML, which even manages to find the space to introduce Groovy for SOAP, XML-RPC and REST web services.

The final part of the book describes some non-core libraries and other applications of Groovy. The chapter on Groovy extensions to JUnit is interesting, although perhaps this is one place where it assumes too little on behalf of the reader. I would have assumed that the average developer sufficiently motivated to pick up a book on Groovy knows enough about unit testing and JUnit that more space could have been given to the advanced topics. Particularly appealing is the idea of testing Java code with dynamically typed Groovy unit tests, which would make mocking and stubbing more palatable; I would have liked more on that subject.

Another noteworthy chapter is the last one, which introduces the web app framework Grails. This has a different style to the other chapters, being a dialogue between two of the authors as they build a simple app. This reader admits to finding it a little bit naff, but it does usefully demonstrate the grails way (which is a lot like Rails).

If you have the slightest interest in Groovy, alternatives to Java on the JVM, or dynamic languages, GinA makes the perfect case for Groovy as a first class integration language for all the bits of Java where you really wish you were working with something like Perl, Ruby or Python. It's well-written, with good examples, clear explanations, and it's relentlessly practical, never forgetting its target audience. It's all the more impressive given lead author Dierk Konig's comment in the preface that English is not his first language. Kudos to him and his co-authors for what they've delivered.

One can only wish that every language had its GinA. Outstanding.

An excellent book for both old and new, 25 Apr 2007
The book is well presented, well written; moreover, the examples and instructions WORK. The authors have a very easy-going style, and you find yourself having a lot of fun (my favourite is the Grails example in the back, got me interested enough to rework a new project to use Grails+Groovy instead of my usual Delphi/PHP for web services).
The guys did an incredible job.

My only gripe (and the reason for the 4star rating); the Index is terrible.
Maybe it's just me, but if I'm looking for details on something specific (eg String Objects), I expect to get at least a bit of detail when I turn to the page identified in the index - instead of just finding the word String in italics on the page.
I'm not really familiar with how these things are done, but I would suggest fixing this in the next release of this book.

Wrecked by coding errors, 26 Jul 2008
This is an adequate, though uninspired, look through the basics of using PHP and MySQL to build dynamic web sites. Because it is trying to cover two major topics from a starter level it is unable to treat either in the depth needed for the reader to become fluent in either the use of SQL databases, or PHP.

However, the book also suffers from a serious flaw which renders it unfit to be used by those wishing to learn the subjects involved. The sample PHP code is frequently incorrect, and this will cause endless confusion for newcomers. It is clear that insufficient attention has been paid to making sure the code is correct, which would seem to indicate that the authors haven't even tried to run the code they present.

What the editors at O'Reilly were thinking of when they let this go through, I really don't know.

Not recommended.




Full of mistakes, utterly unprofessional, 09 May 2008
I'm on the verge of giving up with this book. I'm not a qualified programmer, so I want to be able to trust that the book I'm using is accurate. This book isn't.

Some typos are stupid simple things that anyone with internet experience can probably fix - e.g. it says apache.or/... when it means apache.org/... They'll cause what you're doing to fail, but will only cost you about 5 minutes to fix and a few units of sanity as you curse O'Reily Media for being so shockingly unprofessional.

Others are fatal (figurativly speaking!), or at least for someone like me of the level this book pretends to be aimed at (experience with HTML & CSS, no formal programming background). E.g. when it's guiding you through setting up PHP to run with Apache, it leads you by the hand as far as opening the .conf file you need to modify in notepad, takes you to the right section in the file, and then... "Restart Apache so it can read the new configuration". But I haven't changed the configuration! They seem to have literally forgotten to write what I actually need to do! Even worse, the things they did bother to explain (e.g. that I might want to use notepad.exe) I could have worked out for myself. There's a screenshot, which has different code to what's on my screen, but copying it so they match doesn't work...

An experienced programmer who knows and understands php, mysql, apache etc would have no trouble working out what to do. But why would such a person need or want this book? What's the point of a teaching book when you need to already know everything in the book in order to spot when the book itself is wrong?

As for the explanations, they're sometimes good and easy to follow, but again there are careless slips. This book is quite often guilty of taking you by the hand through the simple things to the point of being patronising and then dumping a whole pile of new, difficult material on you without any real explanation.

E.g. it explains in withering detail the concept of multiplication coming before addition unless there are brackets (thank you, but I did actually go to school...) then the very next page it casually mentions that ~ means 'bitwise NOT' without any explanation of what the 'bitwise' part means. So they expect be to have failed pre-GCSE-level maths, but to know technical programming jargon...

This is the second time I've been let down by an O'Reily book that claims to be accessible to and usable by non-programmers. Never again.

(p.s. after having looked for the ommitted information, I think it's the 1st edition of the book I've been struggling with. However, it seems from other reviews and discussions that the 2nd edition has exactly the same problems, and I can't find the information I need anywhere, including on the O'Reilly website. Therefore what I say still stands, although the particular typos and omissions might be different, hence 2 stars instead of 1)

Good intro, but too many typos, 30 Apr 2008
Good overall introduction to using php and mysql, that also introduces you to using tools like PEAR and the smarty template engine. I bought the book because a) I've been impressed with O'REilly books before and b) It included chapters on Security and on Sessions and Access Controls. I was also impressed that the Mysql parts included basic dba necessities such as backups, imports and use of indexes etc. However (and this is why I'm not giving the full 5 stars) there were a lot of silly typos in the code I typed in from the book. Once I looked at the Oreilly site (they correct some typos there) I was able to hunt down the rest. I suspect it would be a showstopper for someone who hasn't the relevant programming experience however. Since the book didn't come with code on disk I can only give 3 stars (or three and a half).

Learning PHP and MySQL, 07 Oct 2007
PHP and MySQL are highly adaptive programs that can be used to create a variety of dynamic website potentials. Although fairly simple to use once you understand the basics, the learning curve on these programs is a little high at first. In order to use the capabilities, the user has to not only understand what the programs do and how they work together. However, probably the hardest part of the process is learning all the vocabulary associated with these systems.

Learning PHP & MySQL is a very good reference, especially for this latter challenge. The guide not only defines and explains each of the different concepts but gives examples that better illustrate these aspects while giving the user a glimpse into how they could use them for their own purposes. Especially for the more difficult sections, I really liked that I could replicate the code on my computer and see the results for myself. This aspect gave me a far better idea of how I could use these programs in conjunction to create the effects I want.

The best book in circulation on Hibernate , 18 Oct 2008
I was new to Hibernate when I finally decided to buy this book. I must say it has been a pleasure reading it from first to last page. If one wants to become very proficient at hibernate, I strongly recommend this book. Not only it tells the reader everything there is to know about Hibernate (and I mean everything!) but it also presents both the Hibernate world and the JPA world. Obviously the HB world provides much more functionalities than the JPA, but then the JPA is only in its first release and many of the functionalities today provided by HB will be available in JPA. By the end of this book you'll be able to work proficiently on HB and address also advanced issues such as performance optimisation (with 1st and 2nd level caches), reporting queries, design and testing patterns.

Awesome book. Deceptive title., 23 May 2008
For me a more apt title would have been: "ORM with Hibernate and EJB3".

This book conveys loads of excellent information.

There is a great Domain Model "Caveat Emptor" that is used as backdrop for the bulk of the book based upon an auction system to convey the intricacies of the technologies.

* Part 1 (about 150 pages) is more example orientated and shows how to use Ant tasks to turn Java entities annotated with meta-data or in association with XML to DDL/SQL and vice-versa.
* The next 540 pages (Part 2 & first section of Part 3) make up the bulk of the book. This part is more of a reference. This material is very informative, but a bit of a slog,
heavy going and dry at times. Quite taxing on the old brain!
The format generally the following pattern:
-> The Hibernate way of doing things. Sometimes with XML. Sometimes with annotations.
-> The EJB3 way.
-> How Hibernate can compliment EJB3 and sometimes vice-versa.
-> A summation highlighting two technologies.
* The last two chapters of Part 3 (next 200 pages) are awesome and what make the book really shine.
They return to a more easy to understand example driven format and tie everything together.
The penultimate chapter has a good discussion on architectural concerns. (Unfortunately you ought to plough through the detailed reference section to best understand everything).
There is also an interesting introduction to TestNG.
* The last chapter goes on to demonstrate Seam. As a framework it overcomes some of the pitfalls of JSF. It has definately sparked my interest in learning more about Seam
and rekindled my interest in JSF.
* On a final note. It's also a great SQL reference to boot.
Great job Christian and Gavin!

Too much., 13 Nov 2007
I've recently been reading Java Persistence with Hibernate, having had limited experience with Hibernate previously. My thinking was that a book this size should provide a really gentle but complete coverage.

After 5 months, I had got as far as Chapter 7. Normally, I fly through books, but there was something about this one that just didn't work for me. I don't like 'giving up', but by chapter 7 I asked myself honestly a) was I enjoying it and b) was I learning, and I came to 'no' for both.

The book (as we know) was written by the authors of Hibernate, and to this end they know it inside out. However, this is also their weakness. Instead of giving me what I needed - an overview, followed by some good examples that I could follow and learn from, they would show me one way to do something in Hibernate, then in annotations, then with JPA xml, then with JPA annotations except for the bits that couldn't be reached and so had to use Hibernate annotations. Then they would give me a reason/situation when this approach couldn't be used, and the process would start over with a new technique. As a reference, this is excellent. As a learning book, it's a nightmare, so much so that I've stopped reading.

The definitive hibernate reference, 14 Sep 2007
If you are going to buy a book about how to use Hibernate, this is the one to get.

It has in depth coverage of native Hibernate, JPA (just because JPA is a standard doesn't make it evil) and the Hibernate implementation of JPA. It also covers the issues surrounding object/relational mapping and various "architectural" options for using persistent objects in an application.

It's a big book - it needs to be, it covers a lot of ground and contains a lot of detail. I'd go for the PDF version, it weighs less and you can use the PDF reader to search the text.

Could have been so much better, 22 Feb 2007
I have found Hibernate In Action to be an indispensible guide when developing Hibernate persistence solutions, so I was eagerly awaiting the release of its successor.

Most developers will want to use standard JPA as much as possible for portability reasons, and only use Hibernate where absolutely necessary to use features not supported by JPA.
However this book fails to cleanly separate discussion of JPA from Hibernate, meaning that if you take this approach to using JPA you end up wading through large sections of the 800+ pages of this weighty tome.

I have to agree with Ganeshji and C. Updike - this lack of any clean separation of JPA and Hibernate makes it difficult to get useful information out of the book.

This is a shame, as the writing is of a high standard - unfortunately the content is very poorly organised.

Does Exactly What It Says On The Tin, 14 May 2008
A few pages past the table of contents, I had solved two issues that had been bugging me since my last install. It was pretty minor stuff, but could I as heck find the answers online. It just shows what research, presentation, and quality control can achieve. So, another score for books over bytes.

The layout is uncluttered, and you can usually get the gist without reading through pages of preamble and exposition. The examples are practical and adaptable (no long and complex routines found on some sites) so they can almost be cut and pasted into your own applications. As your applications develop, there's always something else you can add.

The only downside is that it's a book - a few mods to MySQL and you might have to fork out for the next revision. Still, I should have got my money's worth by then.

Teaches you SQL, 31 Mar 2006
Explains by example so many common queries you'll be able to solve a wide variety of problems instantly. SQL is a deceptively deep language and getting to grips with this small army of queries gives you the basics to build on.

Easy reading and sensible examples. Some omissions (insert) but it's not the complex stuff - that part is really taught well.

Not good for new programmers, 05 Aug 2008
Not impressed with this book.
Information is scattered all over the pages. Not arranged in order.
No explanation for diagrams.
Introduction itself is bit strange.


Comprehensive - read this and pass your SCBCD 5 for EJB3, 13 Jun 2008
This book is all you need to read if you want to know about EJB3, and it helpfully makes comparisons between EJB2 and EJB3 throughout the text.

If you read chapters 1 to 17 of this book, that's all you need to know to sit the Sun Certified Business Component Developer exam (JEE 5). I sat it this week and got 90%, using only this book and the Whizlabs mock exams as a reference.

The only down point of the book is that it must be read like a novel to really understand EJB3. It's not an easy lookup reference book, you can't just dip in and out of it. For example, different aspects of persistence contexts and transactions are featured in more than one chapter, wh