Rating:  - Decent overview, but has a few shortcomings
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:  - Superficial/Inadequate
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:  - Great Hibernate intro/tutorial
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: - Saved me a ton of time and frustration.
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: - Very, very, very helpful
This is a great book to learn Hibernate. The only thing I have to complain is that the author sometimes wants the examples to explain what he is trying to do rather than explain it in words. Thats the reason for the 4 *, but otherwise a very helpful, concise book if you want to learn one the leading persistence frameworks available today.
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