What is the best eBook for a Hibernate beginner?
The online Reference Documentation is a good place to start, especially the Hibernate 5 new User Guide.
And for the "absolute reference", get Java Persistence with Hibernate (a revised edition of the old Hibernate in Action). Here is what the authors write about this book:
We had three goals when writing this book, so you can read it as
- A tutorial for Hibernate, Java Persistence, and EJB 3.0 that guides you through your first steps with these solutions
- A guide for learning all basic and advanced Hibernate features for object/ relational mapping, object processing, querying, performance optimization, and application design
- A reference for whenever you need a complete and technically accurate definition of Hibernate and Java Persistence functionality
As stated, it's the absolute reference (880 pages), it allows to go as deep as you want.
For tuning Hibernate, you could also check the High-Performance Java Persistence book.
I'd suggest to take a look at this free knol : Nhibernate by Fabio Maulo, it's a link to the first chapter (total: 20 chapters). Also:
- Introduction to Nhibernate By Ian Cooper
- Your very first Nhibernate application (3 parts)
- Summer of Nhibernate screencast series
- This one is old, but it's well written and easy to understand for beginners: Part 1 | Part 2
- This Wiki and this list of articles should be your friends too:)