Rating: 

Overall a good book but dated. The code (and especially the Ant buildfile and Hibernate configuration) needs quite a bit of work to work correctly with Hibernate 3 and Hsqldb 1.8.

Took me a while to figure out why none of the changes made to the database were persisted for example, until I read that Hsqldb now no longer persists anything to disc unless an explicit shutdown command is issued when used in embedded mode.

With a bit of puzzling and experimentation it can all be made to work but you will run into the occasional snag using the current book with up to date versions of the tools used in it.