What You Need to Use This Book

To get the most out of this book, you need access to J2SE 5.0, the Bouncy Castle provider, and the JavaMail API. That being said, the Bouncy Castle provider supports earlier versions of Java, back to JDK 1.1. Consequently, most of the examples in the book will work with earlier versions of Java as well. When they don't, I have included pointers as to how to get them to work with earlier versions of Java.

I'm assuming you're already aware that both the JDK and JavaMail APIs are freely available from http://java.sun.com. As for the open source Bouncy Castle provider, you can find it at http://www.bouncycastle.org. This book also discusses a number of standards that are available online at no charge, so if you want to do further reading it is easy to do so. You can find these standards listed in Appendix D, "Bibliography and Further Reading," and if you want to cover the content of a particular chapter in depth, you might find it useful to download the relevant standard so you can consult it as you go.

Conventions

To help you get the most from the text and keep track of what's happening, we've used a number of conventions throughout the book.

Examples that you can download and try out for yourself generally appear in a box like this:

Try It Out

Try It Out is an exercise you should work through, following the text in the book.

They usually consist of a set of steps.
Each step has a number.
Follow the steps through with your copy of the database.

How It Works

After each Try It Out , the code you've typed will be explained in detail.

Important

Boxes like this one hold important, not-to-be forgotten information that is directly relevant to the surrounding text.

As for styles in the text:

q We highlight new terms and important words when we introduce them.
q We show keyboard strokes like this: Ctrl+A.
q We show filenames, URLs, and code within the text like so: persistence.properties .
q We present code in two different ways:


In code examples we highlight new and important code with a gray
background.

The gray highlighting is not used for code that's less important
in the present context, or has been shown before.

Source Code

As you work through the examples in this book, you may choose either to type in all the code manually or to use the source code files that accompany the book. All of the source code used in this book is available for download at http://www.wrox.com. Once at the site, simply locate the book's title (either by using the Search box or by using one of the title lists) and click the Download Code link on the book's detail page to obtain all the source code for the book.

Note	Because many books have similar titles, you may find it easiest to search by ISBN; for this book the ISBN is 0-764-59633-0.

Once you download the code, just decompress it with your favorite compression tool. Alternately, you can go to the main Wrox code download page at http://www.wrox.com/dynamic/books/download.aspx to see the code available for this book and all other Wrox books.

Errata

We make every effort to ensure that there are no errors in the text or in the code. However, no one is perfect, and mistakes do occur. If you find an error in one of our books, like a spelling mistake or faulty piece of code, we would be very grateful for your feedback. By sending in errata you may save another reader hours of frustration, and at the same time, you will be helping us provide even higher-quality information.

To find the errata page for this book, go to http://www.wrox.com and locate the title using the Search box or one of the title lists. Then, on the book details page, click the Book Errata link. On this page you can view all errata that has been submitted for this book and posted by Wrox editors. Acomplete book list including links to each book's errata is also available at http://www.wrox.com/misc-pages/booklist.shtml.

If you don't spot "your" error on the Book Errata page, go to http://www.wrox.com/contact/techsupport.shtml and complete the form there to send us the error you have found. We'll check the information and, if appropriate, post a message to the book's errata page and fix the problem in subsequent editions of the book.