Rating: 
Summary: Easy to try out
Review: A very recent open source aid to handling the mapping of Java onto a SQL database. The need is unquestioned, because of the impedance difference between Java's objects and the relational nature of the database.Elliott shows how Hibernate is pitched at java programmers, who may not be as fluent in writing JDBC to SQL. Plus, java code that uses JDBC is usually pretty grotty. Lots of string manipulations to prepare those query statements. The code Elliott gives certainly seems more concise and elegant. The importance of the latter should be appreciated, for more than just aesthetic reaons. It makes code easier to understand and debug. Learning and using Hibernate's classes (and there aren't that many of them, which helps) feels more natural that the string constructions of queries. Another point in the book's favour is that you can quickly read it and starting trying it out. So even if it and Hibernate turn out not be right for you, it is a modest investment of your time.
Rating: 
Summary: Perfect for starting out
Review: As an experienced Java programmer, it's refreshing to find a book on a new technology that focuses on the technology and not my Java skills. This book gets a programmer up and running in minutes. I went through the first half of the book (doing all the examples) in about 90 minutes. It'll give you a full Hibernate installation and a good idea of whether or not you need to invest more time in Hibernate. I co-authored the Java Swing title with Jim Elliott and knew I would enjoy this book. Even so, I'm impressed with its concise nature and I applaud O'Reilly for putting the right price tag on it. It's not the last book you'll ever buy on Hibernate, but it should definitely be your first.
Rating:
Summary: Terse, complete walkthrough for O/R experts
Review: At around 150 pages this is not a 'for dummies' book. It's a quick walkthrough of the essential features of Hibernate for those that already understand the basic principles of O/R mapping layers. It starts with installation, then goes quickly into the code in a what/how format. What do I want to do. How is that done. Over and over until all of the essential features of Hibernate are covered.
I like the voicing of the book, which is to treat the reader with respect. I like that there are not a lot of screenshots. And I particularly like the brief but thorough writing style.
I recommend this book to anyone familiar with O/R mapping layers but who needs an introduction to Hibernate.
Rating:
Summary: The BEST first book on Hibernate
Review: Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook is the first in the new Developer's Notebook series from O'Reilly. The Developer's Notebook series is a new line of books from O'Reilly that are concise, lab-style guides that have plenty of examples and emphasize practice over theory. For being the first one, O'Reilly has hit a home run with this book. Hibernate is a lightweight, high performance object/relational persistence and query service for Java. Hibernate allows you to work easily and efficiently with information from a relational database in the form of natural Java objects following common Java idiom - including association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition and the Java collections framework Written by James Elliott, Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook is an excellent must-own book for anyone interesting in learning more about Hibernate. James does a great job in explaining the topic at hand in a clear and concise manner. All the concepts are explained via examples, which make it easy to follow and learn. Staring with installation and the setup of your development environment, the book walks you through examples where you build on a small application as you progress through the book learning the subtleties and nuances of Hibernate. This book is extremely readable and is small enough to read cover to cover in a day. My pattern for reading technical books involves reading (or skimming) the book cover to cover before doing a deep dive and working through all the code examples. I found the examples easy to follow and they did a great job in building on the concepts of Hibernate. I know that Hibernate founder Gavin King and Christian Bauer, a member of the core Hibernate developer team have just finished their new book Hibernate in Action due to ship in August 2004. I am really looking forward to that book and have pre-ordered that book. Having said that, I still highly recommend this O'Reilly book. I had read a couple of articles on Hibernate and had played with some simple examples but this book gave me all the knowledge and tools to start using Hibernate in a real application. This is a really well written, concise guide to Hibernate and well worth the purchase price. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more about Hibernate and is a great first Hibernate book.
Rating:
Summary: Saved me a ton of time and frustration.
Review: I'm an experienced Java developer. I've used homegrown object/relational mapping and persistence systems, but had never used Hibernate before my current project. One of the reviews said he read the whole thing on a plane flight: I have to admit that it took me several days to get through the whole thing, working every example as I went. At the end, I had a good understanding of Hibernate, and was well prepared to use the Hibernate reference manual. Even now, when I get stuck in some weird problem (and I do), I often get out of it by examining the examples in this book, and figuring out where my code deviates from the example.
Rating:
Summary: First Steps on Hibernate ? It's for you !!!
Review: I've never used Hibernate before. As I started reading this book I realized that it goes straight into coding and explanations about what to do and what it's happening and one interesting questions that is made across the book: "Why do I Care ?". That shows what is important and why should you read about that.
With less then 200 pages it's not a bible, but it got everything you need to start using hibernate with good practices, Ant builds , HSQL integrated tests, and it makes you keep coding in a progressive sample through all the chapters.
It's a nice kick start.
Rating:
Summary: Good first book on a very cool API
Review: If you are familiar with ant, database and sql basics, and of course well versed in Java ,this book is a good way to get your feet wet with Hibernate without a lot of ceremony. At the end of the book you certainly won't be a Hibernate expert but at least you will know enough to start playing with it and decide if you want to go farther. Writing style is concise but clear enough, and gets a little confusing only in the two central chapters on richer associations and enumerated types. Overall I like the dev notebook style, but I think that 50 pages more used for more clarity and examples would have made it perfect.
Rating: 
Summary: Superficial/Inadequate
Review: In the modern world of the typical programmer being challenged, to catch up with a moving target of "new/cool technologies", it is not surprising that there are many many books, whose titles read as "Learn XXX in 2 hours".
This is unfortunately just another another book attesting to the same fallacy.
I just finished this book cover to cover. Needless to say that the matter is covered only superficially. What is worse is the fact that sometimes the explanation becomes more confusing.
It is only to be expected from a book whose author agress that he has never used Hibernate in a real project, himself.
Though the book is only less than 200 pages, there are tons of lines of code, duplicated multiple times.
Treatments like the one-to-many relations, foreign key etc. are just vague, though the code is used over and over again.
I just got "Hibernate in Action" by mail today. Though I havent started to read it, it looks much better than this book.
The only reason I can see why this book has as many reviews it has, is because this was the only book available on the subject, till this month, when Hibernate in Action got published.
Rating:
Summary: Invest Time to Learn Hibernate
Review: Once you learn JDBC basics, I'd strongly recommend you learn Hibernate! The Database example gets progressively more complex; it gave me my first intro to how powerful Ant can be in doing repetitive tasks like compile build run. And his example take you all the way thru inserting and updating multiple tables using Hibernate to generate most of your code. Wow! This book doesn't pretend to be a reference, but instead a serious of examples to give a developer a solid intro to Hibernate and I think it does that great!
Rating: 
Summary: a lot of hand-holding
Review: Some reviewers described this book as 'terse'. So I expected a 'just the core stuff' approach. I was very disappointed. A lot of time is spent on uninteresting stuff such as setting up trivial Ant scripts. The notes are not the essential insights and gotchas that you gain by experience but trivial and childish.
Basically I found this book to do a lot of hand-holding. So much so that, while I'm very interested in Hibernate,I just discarded it after a few chapters. Money wasted.
I agree with another reviewer that I will not buy a book from this series again.
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