Most people choose to skip the introduction chapter of any book. If you are not one of them and have actually gone through my attempt at introducing you to the world of ORMs and NHibernate in particular, then congratulations, you have had a very good start. You now know briefly what NHibernate is and what kind of problems it solves for you. You may also have an idea of some of the advanced features of NHibernate. Last, but not least, I hope that now, you have an answer to the question "Whether using an ORM is a bad idea?," and I hope that the answer is a resounding "No."

In next chapter, I am going to present a business problem. The aim is to use NHibernate to build the data access layer as one of the parts of the solution to this problem. We will build the data access layer incrementally as we go over each chapter. In the next chapter, I will also talk about how to set up your development environment and how to get ready for some NHibernate action. Just flip over when you are ready.