Spring Persistence with Hibernate (Beginning)

[Book Review Team]

Author/s    : Paul Tepper Fisher, Brian D. Murphy
Publisher   : Apress
Category   : Miscellaneous Java
Review by : Jeanne Boyarsky
Rating        : 7 horseshoes

Apress' "Spring Persistence with Hibernate" covers Spring 3.0. (Take care that you don't confuse it with Packt's book with the same title which covers Spring 2.5)

The roadmap on the back cover implies you should have read "Beginning Spring" or "Beginning Hibernate." For an experienced developer, this isn't necessary. The key is that this book is fast moving so you should have some development background. It does cover beginner concepts - just faster.

The book goes beyond the title with bonus chapters on integration, Grails and Roo. It also covers the basic Spring MVC setup. I particularly liked the chapter with things to beware of including lazy loading and caching.

The only errors I caught were the case of @PostConstruct and @PreDestroy. They were consistenly wrong which makes me think it was edited after the authors last saw it. I also noticed a JUnit version mismatch while not wrong per se. Didn't affect readability though and the testing coverage was still good.

Overall, I was happy with the book.


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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.

More info at Amazon.com

[Sai Hegde]

This book is simply awesome... Great job Paul and Brian...


Disclosure: I didn't receive a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review.

[Book Review Team]

Review by : Christophe Verre
Rating        : 8 horseshoes

If you are looking for a book to learn about Spring and Hibernate, pass your way. If you are looking for a reference, pass your way. So who is this book for ? I think it is aimed at people who want to try a simple application using Spring3 and Hibernate 3.x (JPA2). It is fast paced, straight to the point. If you know what you are doing, it's a fun book. You'll start by setting your development environment (authors use Maven), configure Spring and Hibernate, make some domain classes, make some DAOs... Very fun. But don't expect to find answers if you're stuck somewhere.

There are some interesting explanations about persistence optimization like caching and lazy-loading, as well as a chapter about integration of frameworks like Dozer and Lucene. It also mentions REST and Spring MVC, and concludes with Grails and Spring Roo. These last two might be out of topic, but they have their own merit. I think they are worth reading.

I didn't notice many typos. Source snippets are neither too short nor too big. They illustrate well the explanation they are attached to. I already know about Spring3 and JPA2, but I never used Hibernate as my persistence provider. This book provided me a chance to try it. I felt it was not like any other technical books. Very enjoyable.

More info at Amazon.com