Rating:  - Lots of good information, no fluff
I found this book fills in a lot of the gaps left by Hibernate's online docs, but didn't dwell on the simple, basic stuff. It's been particularly useful in the area of defining relationships involving collections--one of the trickiest parts of setting up a mapping.
Rating:  - repetitive
Like other people have said, this book is pretty short. To make matters worse, it repeats itself a lot and wastes a lot of pages with boring code such as using 3 pages to show a POJO (plain old java object) with nothing but getters and setters. Did they really need to show that? This book is an ok introduction to hibernate, but definately isn't worth the price. A lot of the same information can be found online, and this book doesn't really present the information in a new or useful way.
Rating: - just ok
I was hoping for more in-depth information about Hibernate 3. The book flows ok and is easy to read, but just doesn't have the details that you can find with the general documentation. I should have previewed the book at a local store before buying it. Hibernate in Action is supposed to be the best Hibernate book, but didn't buy it because it is almost 2 years old now. Looking back, probably should have bought that to get a good foundation, then used the online docs to find the differences with ver 3.
Rating:  - Well-written introduction
I got this book in order to find out what Hibernate was all about and whether I could use it in my projects. I started with no idea of the framework at all and a couple of questions about its general use.
These questions I had were answered right in the first few chapters when the overall usefulness of Hibernate was discussed. And given the well-written chapters of the book (as a non-native English speaker I had absolutely no problems understanding them) I got a good grasp of the Hibernate basics as well.
I think it's a very good book that's surely worth its price.
Rating:  - Covers the basics at the surface. 3 3/4 Stars
So you are starting off with Hibernate and you want a book to learn from. If you want the basics and get up an running pretty quickly, then this book works well for you. If you intend to do some complex stuff that is using more underneath tools of Hibernate, then this book might be too surface for you.
I enjoyed the book and recommend it as a beginner's book just starting off. I think the examples and writing style make it an easy to read and understand book. But I also think it stays to high level with Hibernate. Hibernate has an interesting learning curve. The basic simple mappings are easy, but once you get more relational and complex, then the learning curve steepens. I would have liked to have seen this book delve into the more "gotchas" that everyone learning Hibernate always fall into, but it doesn't.
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