A question on Hibernate made easy

[Henry Yang]

Hi,Cameron.
First,congratulation on your new book!
I just have one question about your book.
I studied some about Hibernate before,but unfortunately,I have never used it in my project.But now,I have to pick it up again for our new project in two months.Can I plunge into our project immediately if I have read part of your book and did some practical examples in the book?
(I want to dive into the project as soon as possible)

[Cameron Wallace McKenzie]

One thing I really tried to do with this book was to provide a resource that people can use to get up and running with Hibernate as soon as possible. To that end, this book will get you up and running with Hibernate very fast. Most people tell me they get through the first three chapters in one sitting, which means that in one sitting, they've configured their environment, used Hibernate to create database tables in their database, and have managed to use Hibernate to create records and interact with the database. That's pretty awesome for a brief, first take on Hibernate.

Plus, the book is filled with many, self-contained examples. By 'self-contained' I mean that you can turn to pretty much any chapter in the book and do the code examples - you don't have to do every chapter leading up to the one in which you're interested. This provides great flexibility, and the ability for the reader to do some self-directed learning - you can concentrate on what is most important to you, and skip the stuff that you might be using. So, if you need to know many-to-many associations, you can go right to that chapter. If you don't need to know about inheritance mapping at the moment, you can skip that section. Personally, that's the way I like to learn, and subsequently, that's the way I write my books.

One of the things that you will find if you read my book is that you will really understand how Hibernate works, not just 'how to do things with Hibernate.' With a deeper understanding of the tool, using Hibernate and JPA on persistence projects becomes easier, you run into fewer problems, and when problems do arise, you know how to fix them. That's one of the big places that the book delivers.

-Cameron McKenzie

[Pradeep bhatt]

Do you suggest using IDEs like eclipse ?

[Cameron Wallace McKenzie]

My book remains database agnostic.

One thing I did not want to do is write a book where people can't get past the first chapter without downloading MySQL or Hyperion, or where people couldn't run the examples without using ANT or Maven.

In the book, all of the examples are written in such a way that they can work against and database that supports JDBC, and the code can be written in any IDE. In my video tutorials, I actually do all the examples in the book using nothing more than the JDK, MySQL and Windows Notepad, and that even includes a moderately advanced little web based application that demonstrates how to use DAOs and integrate Hiberante into a Servlet/JSP based web application.

So, you really can't get more egalitarian than Notepad or Wordpad. And all the steps are there to set up the environment. The instructions can easily be used to set up Eclipse or NetBeans or Rational Application Developer or WSDA or RSA or MyEclipse or whatever.

Having said all that, I was thinking of perhaps doing a Hibernate book for WebSphere, DB2 and Rational Application Developer, but we'll just have to see what the demand is for this version of the book first. There's nothing worse than writing a book that nobody reads.

Kindest regards,

-Cameron McKenzie