I am having trouble getting started with Hibernate 3.5 and 3.6, following the documentation and its tutorials. I will post my frustrations later after I finish looking through the 367 posts to this forum identified by a search for "getting started" (including the quotes, if that matters), many of which have tens of responses. I would imagine that real users of Hibernate don't want to encounter this noise, and that new users have trouble finding their way to the information they need. Besides, any forum with 57009 topics and 180615 posts probably needs some kind of refactoring!

Hi, I totally agree with you and had similar issues myself when first exposed to Hibernate.
I often am asked to provide more documentation, but the real problem is that there's an overload of low quality information - my idea is that whatever we might write it will be lost in this ocean.

so I think the best strategy is to focus on having very good "official documentation", like the always-progressing Hibernate Getting Started Guide.

I'm going to forwards your suggestion relating to the forum; I'm afraid that this same forum is the "getting started", as advanced users know how to debug and answer themselves, or eventually open issues on JIRA or propose patches and changes on the developer list; but I agree something should be done.

thanks for the feedback, bring on more suggestions :)

Thanks for the response. Another thing I would like is an email address for sending a long document describing frustrations, missing documentation, documentation problems, etc. to someone responsible for the documentation. I haven't checked, but I imagine I could post specific line- and paragraph-level suggestions to the issues tracker, but I would like to write a long description of my getting-started frustrations that doesn't need discussion on a forum and would overwhelm an issues tracker. (I contributed about 100 documentation issues to the Python issue tracker in the past couple of years, but they were quite specific; this is different.)

it's an open source project, and all documentation is part of the project using docbook - a good approach is to propose patches on the docs and attach them to JIRA issues, for the specific ones.
For the non-specific ones you mention, on hibernate.org you'll find the mailing list and irc channels.

There are some good books available (as advertised on this same page) and many different companies sell training courses all over the world, also the source code is containing rather high standard comments and javadoc - so please send your documentation but taking this into account.

I've carefully read Java Persistence with Hibernate all the way through (!) (as well as its predecessor, a number of years ago) -- since the book uses Hibernate 3.2, it is significantly out of date, especially with regard to configuration. Should I therefore start with the book's examples and procedures using Hibernate 3.2? 3.3?

I am extremely experienced software expert -- many decades across many languages, platforms, and technologies, including object-oriented databases and Java. While "I can't get started" is one of my favorite jazz ballads, it is not my favorite experience. Because I do a lot of consulting work and have had a lot of software startup jobs, I am frequently learning or introducing new technologies, so I have lots of experience with getting-started frustrations from both sides. (I have written and taught many professional software development courses, including some for Java, implementation of OOD in OOP languages, relational databases, and object-oriented databases.)

I need to use Hibernate right now for a project. Would it be appropriate to post an offer to this forum offering, say, $200, for someone to get me through the early steps of installation and setup to run the 3.5 and/or 3.6 tutorials? Or perhaps in exchange for a promise to feed my experience back into the Getting Started document and Core Reference? I write a lot of technical materials, and have published two books -- one one of the first introductions to data structures using C++ and last year Bioinformatics Programming Using Python, published by O'Reilly media, so I think I could make significant contributions, especially since I am coming to the material with an unusual combination of expertise, knowledge, and a fresh eye. ["Most Java applications require a persistent class representing felines." (sentence 1 of http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/core/3.5/reference/en-US/html/persistent-classes.html#persistent-classes-pojo ) -- huh?]

Private email exchanges are welcome.

Thanks.

--- Mitchell

Hi Mitchell,
that sounds great, and sorry I didn't mean to ask your CV, we just need the help from everybody to make sure we don't waste time; for exactly this reason I'm glad that you want to propose documentation improvements.

Feel free to contribute and ask for help, this is how it usually works:
- suggestions on punctual improvements go directly to JIRA, attaching a patch or requesting a pull via github. This is true both for code and documentation improvements.
- if you want to work on an improvement and want to discuss it first or need directions, please join the mailing list of IRC channels for a chat
- any question about usage, please use the forums first: we can't help everybody so we have to rely on help from the community, others volunteering. Requests for help on usage on the development list are not considered proper usage.
- people needing professional training can get that from Red Hat and many others
- books weren't written to make some of rich but to help the community; actually some of us helped with the books for free, just for the cause. I really hope people won't get here asking what can be found on the recommended books.
- the Seam framework comes with a rich set of fully working deployable example web applications, quite a good place to get started
- If you're able to checkout the source code, many unit tests are written as short demos of each feature, many are complete functional examples.

I'm personally not going to accept money rewards, but if other do I have no problem with that;
what I'll do is spend what I can of my free time helping people on the forums, and collect some good links for a sticky post on this same forum - more suggestions?