I have been using Hibernate for the last months on a need-to-know basis, googling up solutions or referring to the reference docs when I need to, but I fail to gain a deeper understanding of Hibernate in this way. So I would like to get up to speed on annototions, JPA, and all that stuff, but the most recent book I have seen is from 2006 - that is half a decade ago! I find it strange that such a hot topic has no coverage of any recent advances. Does anyone know if any new editions of previously launched books are planned, or if any new ones are coming out? There should be a decent market for these books.

Regards

the two books on the banner above are the most complete reference around ^^.
Ok them main hibernate book might be from 2006, but was very ahead of time then, and both the internals and the way to use it, best practices, didn't change. Of course many bugs where fixed, and some new features where added. The most notable new feature is JPA2, but consider that JPA2 is an updated to JPA basically including many features which Hibernate already had (and as such are covered in the book). I'd suggest to read that book first to understand the general picture, then you can update yourself reading our blog and more JPA2 references around. JPA2 is part of EE6 standard, so some books on EJB 3.1 should cover this aspect.