Audience

This book is not an introductory text. It is also not a tutorial on any particular API. It is, instead, a description of the best practices for using a database to drive a variety of Java application architectures. It assumes you have at least a passing familiarity with one or more of the Java enterprise APIs, as well as SQL. You do not, however, need to be an expert in all of them. To help you with any holes in your knowledge of these tools, I provide a few tutorial chapters at the end of the book.