There is no doubt that many Spring applications leverage Hibernate as a persistence mechanism, but Hibernate itself is completely independent from Spring.
One of my objectives in this book was to be as focussed as possible in the subject matter. When you write a book, you want to cover everything, and do everything, but in the end, trying to cover too much makes learning difficult for the reader. In my opinion, Hibernate should be fun and easy to learn, because it's fun and easy to use. Adding chapters on Spring or Seam or NHibernate and such, in my opinion, would detract from the focal point of the book, which is to help people learn Hibernate, and learn it quickly.
Having said that though, it is my experience that when people really do understand how Hibernate works, they find it incredibly easy to integrate it into new applications that might use Seam or
JSF or GWT. And that is really the goal of the book, Hibernate Made Easy - to teach people Hibernate, and give them such a fundamental understanding of the technology, that they can easily and eagerly integrate it into any
Java project on which they might be working.
-Cameron McKenzie