The chapter about eclipse and hibernate was somewhat useful, the rest was some sort of tedious tribute to ant, maven and open software in general. The main argument seems to avoid 'complex joins', why would you work with databases at all if you think joins between two tables is rocket science? What will you do if hibernate fails and you don't understand whats going on beneath? How can you design a good database if you find these things to complex?
I bought the book to learn HIBERNATE, not ant, not maven etc. The examples are poor, i.e it shows how to do a one-to-many relationship, what about other relationships?
To me, the hibernate documentation was much more useful, seriously.