Book recomendation on ORM

Question

What is a good book(s) on NHibernate in .Net or any other ORM?

Answer 1

Manning's NHibernate in Action seems good from the reviews and sample chapters (haven't bought it, though).

Answer 2

Overview: Mapping Objects to Relational Databases: O/R Mapping In Detail could be one.

For NH specific: NHibernate in Action

Answer 3

Quick recommendations:

• For NHibernate in depth: NHibernate in Action (rating: 4/5)
• For ORM patterns in general: Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (rating: 5/5)
• For NHibernate with Domain-Driven design: Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns (rating: 4/5)
• For Entity Framwork: Programming Entity Framework: (rating: 3/5)

Detailed Descriptions:

NHibernate in Action: As the others have mentioned, NHibernate in Action is a great book for learning NHibernate in depth. This book is really the only real NHibernate book available. It covers a lot of topics and is a must read for every developer using NHibernate.

Since NHibernate has so much in common with Hibernate (the Java version, from which it was ported) you could read pretty much anyone of the Hibernate books to get a good understanding of the fundamentals of NHibernate.

Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns: For a quick overview of how NHibernate is used as well as a whole lot of other information of how to develop applications using Domain-Driven design, test-driven design, etc. Jimmy Nilsson's Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns is great.

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture: Martin Fowler describes a few general patterns concerning object-relational mapping in his excellent book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. This book includes a whole lot of other patterns as well, and I can highly recommend it.

Pro LINQ Object Relational Mapping with C# 2008: This book gives an introduction to both LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework. It describes how to use these frameworks to build kind of persistence ignorant applications. The book covers some general topics as well as details for the respective frameworks. It is not a great book, but is has some good information.

Programming Entity Framework: This is the book if you want to learn about Entity Framework. It covers a lot of topics, but pretty much everything is Entity Framework specific, so there is not much about ORM in general. Julie Lerman (the author) is far from using domain-driven design or anything remotely ALT.NET like, so this book heavily follows the classic Microsoft path with controls in the UI that bind to the data layer etc.