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I was given the oppurtunity to review a book on NHibernate. The book, called “NHibernate 3 Beginner’s Guide” focuses on developers who want to start working with NHibernate (doh). Since I use NHibernate in most of my projects and because I ranted a bit  in the past about the lack of NHibernate-documentation on the web, I decided to take this oppurtunity and review the book. A better world starts at yourself .

According to the preface, the book focuses on any “new or seasoned developer” in the .NET-world who is looking for a better way to access databases. In my opinion it definatly covers that, but it covers far more.. Also for the more experienced NHibernate-users it can be a very useful book, although they shouldn’t expect a complete whitepaper/cookbook on the subjects they are looking for, it does give you good starting points, tips and hints on those subjects. It also covers new Nhibernate 3.X-subjects like Loquacious and LINQ to NHibernate and some external components like FluentNhibernate and NHProfiler are also covered. So all in all, the book is quite a complete write-up from the NHibernate-world as it is nowadays.

The layout of the book is very simple and logical. The first chapter gives you a short introduction on NHibernate and tells you where you can find additional help or the required libraries. And by the end of chapter two you already have build your first NHibernate-application with fluent mappings and made a full data-roundtrip. The chapters which follow each cover a different aspect of developing with NHibernate. You will find the “standard” topics like the domain and the database layers, but also topics like “Testing, Profiling, Monitoring and Logging” and “Common Pitfalls”. I consider these last few topics extremely useful. I guess most starting NHibernate-developers will probably be happy enough when they get through the first few chapters and that they have got their NH-app running, but for the more experienced people, those chapters are, in my opinion, chapters which are the added value.

The book is a nice and light read, it doesn’t go in depth directly on the subjects and it shows you what it wants to show you in the particular paragraph/chapter. Any related intresting information is explained in other chapters. For example; In chapter two you already are working with the “SessionFactory”-class, but only in chapter six you are learning what it exactly does and how it works. For most people this won’t be a problem, but for the people who immediatly want to have all the insights, it might feel as information was left out (which isn’t). Another small con is the fact that the author likes to use new technologies for his example projects; WPF is still pretty new and most people haven’t worked with it yet, so working for the first time with both NHibernate and WPF might make the reader’s life harder than was necessary. On the other hand, the example applications are not that hard, and pretty much all code can be copied and pasted, that it should give you any problems at all..

All in all, I like this book. This book is a great starting point for people who want to start working with NHibernate, but it easily stay on a more expierenced NHibernate-developer’s bookshelve between the more expert books. For those people this book is a great tool when training people on Nhibernate, upgrading their knowledge from NH2.X to NH3.X or as a basic reference guide.

You can order the book here and you can find a sample chapter here if you want to read it for yourself .