This book looked really promising: a nice, quick guide to get you started ASAP on Hibernate. However, when I started to try to download Hibernate, I became aware that the book is based on Hibernate 2, while the current version is 3.3. Although I thought version 3.3 would be backwards compatible, it was not. Since I didn't want to learn a technology 4 years old, I tried to adapt the examples to version 3.3. In the end, I finished the book only to be aware of the legacy of Hibernate 2. Finally, the book always assumes that you are building a totally new database, which, in the enterprise environment, is rarely the case. Coverage of legacy databases is light or null. You might want to take a look to the book "Java Persistence with Hibernate", which is one of the most comprehensive books I've seen about dealing with legacy databases.