The best way to understand Hibernate internals

Question

I'm trying to understand how Hibernate works under the hood, how it manages lazy loading, transactions, data mappers, unit of work, identity maps, etc.

I wrote a small object model, and I downloaded Hibernate source code for debugging it.

I'm kind of lost, is this the best approach? Does documentation on these issues exist out there (web) ?

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Try the excellent book : Hibernate in Action, also debugging through the source is helpful but (I speak from experience of nhibernate only) understanding the principles before the implementation may be a better approach.