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.

Important 

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

Note 

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

As for styles in the text:

• We italicize important words when we introduce them.

• We show keyboard strokes like this: Ctrl+A.

• We show filenames, URLs, and code within the text like so: persistence.properties

• We present code in two different ways:

  In code examples we highlight new and important code with a gray background. The gray highlighting is absent from code that's less important in the present context, or has been shown before.