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:

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

• Keyboard combination strokes appear like this: Ctrl+A.

• Filenames, URLs, and code within the text appear in a monospaced font, like this: persistence.properties.

• Code is presented in two ways:

   A gray background highlights examples of new and important code. The gray highlighting is not used for code that's less important in the present context, or that has been shown before.