Hibernate : A Developer's Notebook

Rating:
Summary: Decent overview, but has a few shortcomings
Review: This book belongs to O'Reilly new series "developer notebook". I am not sure I really like this new artificial format, that this book tries to adhere to. "How do I do that", and similar named sub-titles make the book appear the same regardless where you open it! Lack of good diagrams (it has a couple, but that's it) with database relationships, class relationships, etc. make this book hard, if not impossible, to use as a reference.

Finally, I found that querying was not adequately explained. How do you query a join based relationship?

Overall, I think the book does provide a decent introduction to Hibernate. I give it four stars, but I doubt I will ever buy another "Developer Notebook" from O'Reilly again.

Rating:
Summary: Great Hibernate intro/tutorial
Review: This book provides a great intro to Hibernate. The book is setup as a step-by-step walkthrough of Hibernates features and functionality. The author starts from the installation process, and walks you through everything you need to know, example by example. This book allowed me to get a working knowledge of Hibernate very quickly. Highly recommend.

Rating:
Summary: Intermediate level, no nonsense notebook
Review: This was my first look at a book from the "Developer's Notebook" series. Personally, I liked the format and the no-nonsense approach. It just gets you up and running with Hibernate, no more, no less. I don't think you need to be an "expert", but you should have at least a working understanding of Java, O/R Mapping, Ant, and SQL.

I also liked the fact that the examples build upon each other as the chapters introduce new topics - no potential confusion with disparate examples for each topic. The Hibernate web site and documentation is already an excellent resource for learning all about Hibernate, and this book does not try to rewrite any of it. It does, however, defer to the online information quite a bit.

I was looking for a quick, hands on book to get Hibernate up and running. This book worked out great.