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Book review: NHibernate in Action

June 14, 2008

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Writing this book review feels kind of weird  because it hasn't actually hit the shelves yet. It is accessible however through the Manning Early Access Program. This book provides a clear insight of using NHibernate as the data access layer of your applications and beyond.

The excessive amount of NHibernate features  isn't the only thing that is written down. There is also a good coverage of OO principles and Domain-Driven Design, although it isn't the primary objective of the book of course. This is especially true for the first and the last three chapters. If you've already read the nominal books DDD and you are familiar with Persistence Ignorance, then you can safely skim through these chapters unless you want to see the interpretation of the authors when it comes to these principles. If you are new to these concepts, then these chapters are of great value to wet your appetite.

Although this book covers a lot of ground, I would certainly recommend it when you're rather new to NHibernate and ORM's in general. I guess this still includes me, although I've been using NHibernate for quite some time now. If you already have some experience with NHibernate, then this book probably doesn't teach you that much. Still, it can quickly get you up to speed when you want to use a particular feature that you haven't used before.

The only minor thing about this book is that I'm afraid that it will soon be out-of-date. The book only covers NHibernate 1.2.x and no features from the upcoming 2.0 release, which adds a lot of new and interesting features. It would be nice if the book already covered some of these features as most of them are ported from Hibernate itself, which is the original Java version.

On the other hand, this book provides an in-depth view of the basic features of NHibernate, which aren't necessarily going to change that much over time anyway.

Let me round off this post by saying that I'm really impressed by the list of books that Manning is going to release the next couple of months. These are the ones that I'm particularly interested in:

I already bought LINQ in Action and also read a lot of good things about C# in Depth, which I'm going to pick up soon.

Take care.

If you and your team want to learn more about how to write maintainable unit tests and get the most out of TDD practices, make sure to have look at our trainings and workshops or check out the books section. Feel free to reach out at infonull@nullprincipal-itnull.be.

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Jan Van Ryswyck

Thank you for visiting my blog. I’m a professional software developer since Y2K. A blogger since Y2K+5. Provider of training and coaching in XP practices. Curator of the Awesome Talks list. Past organizer of the European Virtual ALT.NET meetings. Thinking and learning about all kinds of technologies since forever.

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Thank you for visiting my website. I’m a professional software developer since Y2K. A blogger since Y2K+5. Author of Writing Maintainable Unit Tests. Provider of training and coaching in XP practices. Curator of the Awesome Talks list. Thinking and learning about all kinds of technologies since forever.

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