Conventions

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

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

Tips, hints, tricks, and asides to the current discussion are offset and placed in italics like this.

As for styles in the text:

• New terms and important words are highlighted when they are introduced.

• Keyboard strokes are shown like this: Ctrl+A.

• URLs and code within the text look like this: persistence.properties.

• Code listings are presented in two different ways:

 In code examples, new and important code is highlighted 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.