Rating:  - Good background info, but the "ultimate Hibernate reference" is google
This is not a bad book. I'm glad I bought it and glad I read it. Its problem is that it doesn't live up to its hype. It is not "the ultimate Hibernate reference" by any stretch. In fact, it's not much of a reference at all, so if your expectations of it are too high, you may end up disappointed.
If you are serious about learning Hibernate and want to get as much depth and background on as many aspects of it as possible, this book is definitely worth reading. The text is well-written and clear, and the information is straight from the most qualified Hibernate committers.
On the downside, this book is missing most of the important administrative and troubleshoting information you will want when you are actually using Hibernate, the book isn't organized so you can easily find any particular detail, and Hibernate is moving on, so some of the information is dated.
Ultimately, if you want practical information or a good reference on Hibernate, I don't think the question you want to ask is "what book should I buy?" You want to ask "why should I buy a book at all when I get much better info for free from google search?"
When you are first getting started, the "getting started" example from the online doc distributed with Hibernate is comprehensive and useful. By contrast, the "Hello World" example in this book is superficial and missing information you need. For example, the very first thing when you work with Hibernate you'll have to include about a dozen .jar files into your project, and you have several choices among alternative jars that you won't care much about `till you become more advanced. Some help is online, little or none is in "Hibernate in Action."
I think Hibernate is all-in-all a great piece of software. Object-to-relational mapping is a hard problem to solve, Hibernate does a great job at the basics of it, and the world is a better place because the boys from jboss donated us their solution. When it works it's like good magic should be. But when it fails, it fails hard, horks all over itself, and spews out a bunch of mostly unhelpful junk. Hibernate suffers from having been developed by an insular group of developers who are too close to their problem, and who have lucrative day jobs as consultants they need to get back to. The result is not much in the way of troubleshooting help, and troubleshooting help is what you'll find you need most. Hint 1 - you won't find such help in "Hibernate in Action" so go to google and type in the text of the error message you get. Hint 2 - you will find a lot more people asking the same question than people answering it. Perservere and be a good detective and you will figure out what you need.
References are organized so you can easily find that one little detail of information you need right now. References have things like short sections with short clear titles that are language keywords or clearly intuitive concepts. References also have long, detailed indexes with a lot of repitition. "Hibernate in Action" has none of this, and it is devilishly hard to find details in it even though you know they are in there somewhere. My copy has about 25 little sticky note bookmarks to help me find things, but most often I don't bother and I just go straight to google.
Finally, Hibernate has evolved since this book was published. My favorite change is that it now includes support for Java 5 annotations as an alternative to XML or XDoclet configuration. Hibernate is notable, like Struts, in helping you get out of J2EE-EJB hell, and into XML configuration purgatory. Annotations rock in relieving you of the keeping-the-XML-in-sync-with-the-Java torture, and you need a reference that doesn't steer you towards doing it the old way. AFAIK, as of this writing, that's only available online.
Rating:  - Very clear and easy to follow guide
I have struggled with Object Relational issues for years and have tried a few different techniques until I stumbled across Hibernate a few months ago. Since then I have started a new medium sized enterprise application and decided to use Hibernate. Needless to say, I was impressed with increased productivity from removing my attention from the relational model and placing my focus on the Object Model.
However, I struggled a bit with the online documentation until I decided to buy this book. I can only say that this book is a great resource for anyone new to Hibernate. I was worried that it would be a paper copy of the online documentation but that was not the case.
The authors started with justifying the need for ORM and justifying the various choices made by the Hibernate development team. They spent some time explaining some basic practices in developing POJO. While more experienced Java developers would not need that explanation it was relevant to how the mapping meta data is constructed and helped me to understand some of the decisions being made by the mapping tool.
The authors also noted alternative practices wherever necessary, making it clear that there were multiple ways to accomplish certain tasks and that the way selected in the book was only superior in the given context.
Rating: - Good book
We enjoyed it, had some great hibernate tips, all the guys in the company took it for their vacations to read...
Rating:  - Great concepts, Worthless index, Questionable technology
The authors do a fine job explaining the concepts behind object relational mapping in general and Hibernate in particular. Too bad the book is absolutely crippled by its index. For instance, there is no entry for "discriminator" (or anything close to that), so to go back to that section where I positively recall reading about this term, I have to browse the whole book. Ridiculous. Furthermore, the following statement by the authors themselves throws this entire technology into question: "Retrieving persistent objects from the database is one of the most interesting (and complex) parts of working with Hibernate." If this is so complex, than the Java community has been sold a bill of goods, and its no wonder the exodus to Ruby is gaining momentum.
Rating: - True to the Spirit of "In Action" Series. Comprehensive coverage of Hibernate 2.x.
Hibernate is an Object/Relational mapping framework that attempts to bridge the gap between Object-Oriented programming model and relational database model. In the past, many attempts have been made to bridge this gap or replace one with another, but the gap between the two is one of the hard facts of enterprise computing today. Hibernate is one such attempt that enjoys a lot of success in the community today.
Hibernate in Action, authored by "Christian Bauer" and "Gavin King" (Gavin, being the creator of hibernate), is one of the best books on this topic. Traditionally we have witnessed that the best book on a particular technology is not written by the creator of the technology themselves, but by authors who have the proficiency to explain it pragmatically. Gavin, breaks the shackles and contributes the best book for the technology he created.
The primary target audience is java developers who work with SQL based database systems and have struggled hard to bridge the gap themselves.
The book starts by explaining what "Object/Relational paradigm mismatch" is all about. The authors weigh this to be the prime motivation for any ORM implementation, and wish that the users understand this mismatch, before they jump-in believing that ORM is the magic bullet for all their problems.
The chapters "Introducing and Integrating hibernate", "Mapping persistent classes", "Working with persistent objects" and "Transactions, concurrency, and caching" introduces the basics for various aspects of hibernate. These chapters are the most beneficial part of the book and well exceed the book's cost.
The chapters "Advanced mapping concepts", "Retrieving objects efficiently", "Writing hibernate applications" and "Using the toolset" focus on the advanced concepts. These chapters are rather dry and are mostly useful for reference purposes only. So, if you get lost while reading these chapters, don't worry. It covers so many advanced concepts that not everything will fit into one's head in the first pass. If you frequently visit this section for reference while developing hibernate applications, you will start to appreciate this section slowly but steadily.
In my opinion, if you want just one book to learn and use hibernate for your next project, look no further.
But, don't forget, the next edition is just round the corner. It covers Hibernate 3.x and also includes full coverage of the EJB 3.0's sub specification called Java Persistence API (JPA). So, if you are not in any urgency, then you might want to wait, otherwise, go ahead and get this one for your bookshelf as soon as you can. You won't regret it.
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