My latest book, Hibernate Made Easy, takes the reader from the most basic tasks of setting up a database, downloading Hibernate, and installing the JDK, to much more advanced topics such as the Hibernate cache, implementing DAOs with
Java 5 Generics, and even some best practices and design
patterns.
I hate to classify this as a beginners book, as database persistence from a Java program is itself a fairly advanced topic, wouldn't you say? So, any reader would need a bit of a background in Java basics, running programs, doing loops, and even some basic database fundamentals, such as knowing how to write a basic SELECT * FROM USER query. Certainly this is not highly advanced Java or database knowledge, but as you would probably agree, to do Java based data persistence, you need some knowledge of Java and to a lesser extent, databases.
But the book does start with the basics, showing you how to do an install, and from there, how to write and compile a very simple Java program that uses Hibernate.
Furthermore, the book doesn't require you to install
ANT or Maven or any other technologies - just Java and Hibernate. I believe this makes development much easier. Having said that though, the examples are just Java, so you can run these with Notepad and the javac compiler, or you could just as easily reproduce the examples within Eclipse, RSA, IRAD, WSAD or NetBeans.
Hibernate is powerful, but it's also fun and easy to use. Learning Hibernate should also be fun and easy, and that's what this book tries to achieve.
-Cameron McKenzie