Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Great Book on Hiberanate
Comment: Direct from the source :-)
Great book to read from the original Hibernate developers. In depth and wide coverage about Hibernate.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Bible of ORM
Comment: What I liked about this book is that I actually can read it as a literary book, it's not only a reference. Something to keep by the bed. Gave me the whole picture (Object Relation Mapping in general, it's place in J2EE, Domain Driven Design, testing etc) and gory details (caching, native SQL, batching, extended PersistenceContext, etc).
16-page index including annotations, far better than googling for Answers.
In case you're only looking for the JPA Annotations details (or vice versa) you need to be alert when reading - after choosing JPA as our implementation strategy, I could skip many paragraphs and get through faster.
If you really want to understand ORM through Hibernate, this is all you need. And time to read the 841 pages, of course.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Not as good as the first edition
Comment: This book is still very informative, but it has grown to over 800 pages. It is no longer 'short and sweet'. One of the reasons it has doubled in size is that both Hibernate, JPA, and EJB 3.0 are covered. Moreover, the topics are interleaved, so it is hard to flip to the Hibernate specific content, for example without going through the other details.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very badly written
Comment: I've struggled through about 600 of the 1000 pages of this unnecessarily large book now and have come to the conclusion that there must be something else out there that is better written, more concise, and better structured. I'm not sure what it is, but my advice is to avoid this book. It sucks. The authors clearly are not native English speakers because the sentence structure is very awkward throughout the book. It makes reading very tiresome. They haven't put much thought into the structure either. There's no basic introduction or grounding for what Hibernate is or does. The more important chapters are buried at the back of the book. There's a huge lack of consistency and barely no examples to illustrate how to use Hibernate. They try to tackle too much all at once with Hibernate, JPA, and EJB. It's so overwhelming and it needn't be.
I got my hands on a copy of "Hibernate In Action", and surprisingly it is much more readable that this book. What a shame since JPwH is a *revised version* of HiA! The authors have revised it into uselessness.
Customer Rating:
Summary: difficult for use as a reference
Comment: No doubt, this is the one book to have on Hibernate, and if you are reading this, you probably know why you need Hibernate. My biggest complaints about the book are the lack of clear separation between describing meta data and the different techniques for representing meta data, and worse, the lack of a usable index. I have had a near 0% hit rate when looking up anything in the index, and there are no usable reference pages. A quick-reference Bauer hopes to create will not be much help if it lacks depth appropriate for the depth of the architecture.
I give this 3 stars by starting at 5 stars for the software itself, subtracting one for the ad-hoc approach to documenting how to use it, and subtracting another for it's lack of usefulness as a reference. Although as I said before, I don't think there is a better book out there for Java persistence.
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