Database Programming with JDBC & Java, Second Edition

Using This Book

This book is divided into three very different sections. The first section focuses on the JDBC API. Its first two chapters set the stage by covering enterprise programming and an introduction to relational databases and SQL. Programmers skilled in database programming in other languages may skip on to Chapter 3, where I introduce JDBC in full. Section II applies everything you learn in the first section to real world database programming. Within the context of a concrete business example—a banking application—Section II describes issues you are likely to encounter in building your own database applications. The final section is a reference section for the JDBC Core and Optional Package APIs.

Throughout this book, I have made sure that the examples use javadoc commenting. If you are not familiar with javadoc, it is a utility that ships with the Sun JDK. By using the javadoc format, you can automatically generate web pages that document your Java classes. The persistence library that gets developed later in the book has web documentation at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/jdbc2. Though using javadoc comments takes more space, I believe that it is good programming practice and that it also increases the readability of the examples in this book.