I am a bit confused on how Hibernate can be used to add, delete, and update database entries. There appear to be persist() and save() methods, but I'm not sure how they work. I am used to the JDBC method of simply defining SQL that adds items, such as (INSERT INTO [TABLE] VALUES ("ETC", "ETC")) and so on. As someone who is new working with Hibernate, it is very confusing to work with persist and save, there isn't any SQL method to add to a database like I used to be able to with JDBC.

Any explanation of persist and save would be appreciated. Thanks

The tutorial is a great place to start! http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/4.2/manual/en-US/html/ch01.html