Simon is a hands-on software architect who works within 
[Twitter] simonbrown: Eating cream cakes in the sun at jersey zoo ... chillin'
[Coding the Architecture] Just a short note to plug a handful of sessions that Kevin and I are presenting at the upcoming Software Architect 2008 conference, 3rd-5th June, London. 1. Coding the Architecture : From Developer to Architect The first is a re-run of our ...
Hibernate : A Developer's Notebook
I picked up a copy of Hibernate : A Developer's Notebook at JavaOne a few weeks back and have been reading it on and off on the way to work. I also have the Java 1.5 Tiger: A Developer's Notebook too and I think that these new books are great. They're like the "early access" books that Wrox used to produce but shorter and more to the point.
If you're looking at picking up Hibernate and want a quick start, then you should certainly take a look at this book. It starts off by introducing the tool and then pretty much dives straight in with defining mapping documents and persistent objects before moving on to relationships, queries and so on. Throughout the book it continually answers questions like, "why do I care about this?" and this is really where this book differs from others out there - it's very focussed on getting your job done rather than discussing theory. Unfortunately this book is going back on my bookshelf for the moment ... until I use Hibernate in anger, that is.
Re: Hibernate : A Developer's Notebook
Re: Hibernate : A Developer's Notebook
You might want to know that the Hibernate Developers themselves have very unflattering views of this book. Christian Bauer wrote in the hibernate forums:
Let's just say that i can't recommend the book, not even for beginners, it has many many serious flaws and errors. E.g., all the assumptions and code examples about transactions are plain wrong. The author apparently only learned Hibernate when he wrote the book and just wrote down what he had in mind.