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How to Use This Book

     

How to Use This Book

The Developer's Notebook TM series is a new approach to helping readers rapidly come up to speed with useful new technologies. This book is not intended to be a comprehensive reference manual for Hibernate. Instead, it reflects my own exploration of the system, from initial download and configuration through a series of projects that demonstrate how to accomplish a variety of practical goals.

By reading and following along with these examples, you'll be able to get your own Hibernate environment set up quickly and start using it for realistic tasks right away. It's as if you can 'walk with me' through terrain I've mapped out, while I point out useful landmarks and tricky pitfalls along the way.

Although I certainly include some background materials and explanations of how Hibernate works and why, this is always in the service of a focused task. Sometimes I'll refer you to the reference documentation or other online resources if you'd like more depth about one of the underlying concepts or details about a related but different way to use Hibernate.

Once you're past the first few chapters, you don't need to read the rest in order; you can jump to topics that are particularly interesting or relevant to you. The examples do build on each other, but you can download the finished source code from the book's web site (you may want to start with the previous chapter's files and follow along making changes yourself to implement the examples you're reading). You can always jump back to the earlier examples if they turn out to be interesting because of how they relate to what you've just learned.

     

Font Conventions

This book follows certain conventions for font usage. Understanding these conventions up-front makes it easier to use this book.


Italic

Used for filenames, file extensions, URLs, application names , emphasis, and new terms when they are first introduced.


Constant width

Used for Java class names, methods , variables , properties, data types, database elements, and snippets of code that appear in text.


Constant width bold

Used for commands you enter at the command line and to highlight new code inserted in a running example.


Constant width italic

Used to annotate output.

     

On the Web Site

The web site for this book, www.oreilly.com/catalog/hibernate, offers some important materials you'll want to know about. All the examples for this book can be found there, organized by chapter.

The examples are available as a ZIP archive and a compressed TAR archive.

In many cases, the same files are used throughout a series of chapters, and they evolve to include new features and capabilities from example to example. Each chapter folder in the downloadable archive contains a snapshot of the state of the example system, reflecting all the changes and new content introduced in that chapter.

     

How to Contact Us

Please address comments and questions concerning this book to the publisher:

O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.

1005 Gravenstein Highway North

Sebastopol, CA 95472

(800) 998-9938 (in the United States or Canada)

(707) 829-0515 (international or local)

(707) 829-0104 (fax)

O'Reilly's web page for this book, where we list errata, examples, or any additional information. You can access this page at:

www.oreilly.com/catalog/hibernate/

To comment or ask technical questions about this book, send email to:

bookquestions@oreilly.com

For more information about our books, conferences, Resource Centers, and the O'Reilly Network, see our web site at:

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