Recommended reading?

[peter_budo]

I'm looking forward to learn Core Spring and Hibernate.
Which books would you recommend and some good online resources (beside their websites)?

[peter_budo]

OK, as nobody come forward with any suggestions I went for Java Persistence with Hibernate by Christian Bauer, Gavin King and Spring in Action by Craig Walls, Ryan Breidenbach.

[Ezzaral]

So post back your thoughts on them for us when you're finished :)

[peter_budo]

Little feedback. Finally I made to the end of first code example of chapter 2 from Java Persistence with Hibernate. And here are few quick notes that may help some fresh programmers to speed up their study. (Most of required libraries are included in Hibernate Core download.)

After finishing all coding and including libraries as requested, once HSQLDB is running and you attempt to run application you may get following errors

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
	at persistence.HibernateUtil.<clinit>(HibernateUtil.java:22)
	at hello.HelloWorld.main(HelloWorld.java:20)
	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
	at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
	at com.intellij.rt.execution.application.AppMain.main(AppMain.java:90)
Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/slf4j/LoggerFactory
	at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.<clinit>(Configuration.java:151)
	at persistence.HibernateUtil.<clinit>(HibernateUtil.java:19)

This as error suggest is solved by including slf4j-api-1.5.2.jar (this can be found in Hibernate Core {hibernate_code_folder/lib/required} if you download it or at link mentioned in next section)

after that there is another error set

SLF4J: Failed to load class "org.slf4j.impl.StaticLoggerBinder".
SLF4J: See http://www.slf4j.org/codes.html#StaticLoggerBinder for further details.

which kindly tell you to add slf4j-simple-1.5.2.jar (Downloads can be found here)

At this point when you try to run application again depending on your configuration of Ant you may either get log list of all reporting on execution progress or just straight to another error lot

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
	at persistence.HibernateUtil.<clinit>(HibernateUtil.java:22)
	at hello.HelloWorld.main(HelloWorld.java:20)
	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
	at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
	at com.intellij.rt.execution.application.AppMain.main(AppMain.java:90)
Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javassist/util/proxy/MethodFilter

Once again as error suggest javassist.jar is need to run this application, can be found here Hibernate Core download (hibernate_code_folder/lib/required)
After this additions all is working fine.

So far book is clear on its goals, clear explanations, well paced with examples. Already been showed how to build application from bottom up, introduced to "property" files, reasonably detailed explanation of configuration files (not the deepest details, but most useful features), introduction to Ant and HSQLDB