About This Book
The NHibernate project was started back in 2003 by Paul Hatcher, and with the tremendous work done by Mike Doerfler and Sergei Koshcheyev, it has steadily become a mature product, popular with thousands of .NET developers.
NHibernate was originally a port of the incredibly popular Java Hibernate project, and object/relational mapping has been very popular with the Java crowd for many years.
A consequence of this popularity is that Java developers have access to a whole heap of books about Hibernate. In fact, the last time I counted I found 15 books dedicated purely to this single tool. New books on Hibernate and related technologies are still appearing regularly.
Until now, .NET developers have had no such luxury for learning NHibernate. This book aims to remedy that problem—we finally have our “manual” written for .NET developers and focusing solely on NHibernate. NHibernate in Action is based on the best-selling Hibernate in Action, which is considered to be the de facto manual for Java Hibernate. The book is much more than a translation; in fact, much work has gone into making it appeal to the .NET developer while also accommodating API changes, code differences, new features, and the like.
We hope that the arrival of this book is considered good timing. The world of .NET is finally getting excited about object/relational mapping, and we hope this book will help you discover, learn, and enjoy one of the most mature, powerful ORM frameworks available.