Persistence is an important set of techniques and technologies for accessing and transacting data, and ensuring that data is mobile regardless of specific applications and contexts. In Java development, persistence is a key factor in enterprise, e-commerce, and other transaction-oriented applications. Today, the Spring framework is the leading out-of-the-box solution for enterprise Java developers; in it, you can find a number of Java Persistence solutions. This book gets you rolling with fundamental Spring Framework 3 concepts and integrating persistence functionality into enterprise Java applications using Hibernate, the Java™ Persistence API (JPA) 2, and the Grails Object Relational Mapping tool, GORM.
A must-read for every programmer! Most of the books teach you how to program, or how to use your specific language features, but none of them will teach you how to actually write clean and maintainable code. This one does!
Apress' "Spring Persistence with Hibernate" covers Spring 3.0. (Take care that you don't confuse it with Packt's book with the same title which covers Spring 2.5)
The roadmap on the back cover implies you should have read "Beginning Spring" or "Beginning Hibernate." For an experienced developer, this isn't necessary. The key is that this book is fast moving so you should have some development background. It does cover beginner concepts - just faster.
The book goes beyond the title with bonus chapters on integration, Grails and Roo. It also covers the basic Spring MVC setup. I particularly liked the chapter with things to beware of including lazy loading and caching.
The only errors I caught were the case of @PostConstruct and @PreDestroy. They were consistently wrong which makes me think it was edited after the authors last saw it. I also noticed a JUnit version mismatch while not wrong per se. Didn't affect readability though and the testing coverage was still good.
Overall, I was happy with the book.
--- Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.