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.

Try It Out

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

1. They usually consist of a set of steps.

2. Each step has a number.

3. 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.

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 highlight new terms and important words when we introduce them.

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

• We show file names, 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 not used for code that's less important in the present context, or has been shown before.