I need someone to walk me through the 3.5 and/or 3.6 getting started documents and tutorials to the point where the tutorials run in my OS X 10.6 command-line environment. I would expect to communicate by iChat or equivalent, Skype, screen sharing, or whatever. while we work. It should only take 2-3 hours, if that. I am willing to pay $200 (via PayPal or check). I need this ASAP for a project I am working on, preferably this weekend, but sometime next week would work too.

Direct email to me, please. (Apparently private email is not enabled for this forum (?) so send to user "dev", "software-concepts.org".) I apologize if offering a gig like this is offensive to the Forum community -- I am new to it and have no idea what the reigning attitudes are to this sort of thing. There is a small possibility of my subcontracting the coding of modest examples for this project to someone who successfully gets me going.

I am an extremely knowledgeable software development expert, with extensive experience in a large number of languages, tools, and technologies. I have worked with Java for a number of years, and C++ before that, though lately I have been focusing on Python. I used to work with object-oriented databases, Smalltalk Object-Relational Mapping, and MongoDB. I am completely fluent in the command-line environment. I have read Java Persistence with Hibernate completely and most of the 3.5/3.6 documentation. I am completely new to Hibernate and maven, flummoxed by differences from Hibernate 3.2 (as in the book), 3.3 (as in my MacPorts install), and 3.5 and 3.6 as downloaded from hibernate.org. While I applaud the quality and quantity of documentation and getting started information in the 3.5 and 3.6 releases, they assume too much and leave out critical details. (For instance, they allude to the tutorials found in the download but don't say where; yes, I can search for them, but there are multiple tutorials, CLASSPATHs to set up, ambiguities about what "root" means, and so on.) I'm sure I'll be fine once I can get a few basic examples working.