This book is designed to provide tutorials in a wide variety of J2EE APIs and tools, both standard and de facto. It does not, and cannot, tell you everything you need to know about these APIs and tools. In fact, in almost every case, you’ll find that there are one or more entire books devoted to the topic covered in any given chapter, and we refer you to those books for further reading. In addition to full-length treatments of these topics, there are several valuable (and free) electronic sources of information about Java programming.
Sun’s web site for all things related to Java is http://java.sun.com. The web site specifically for Java developers is http://developer.java.sun.com. Much of the content on this developer site is password-protected, and access to it requires (free) registration.
Some of the enterprise APIs covered in this book are part of the core Java 2 platform, so if you have downloaded the JDK, you already have the classes for APIs such as JDBC, RMI, XML, JNDI, and Java IDL. Other APIs are standard extensions, however; so if you want to use, say, EJBs or servlets, you have to download the classes separately, either by themselves or as part of an application server (for example, the Apache Tomcat web container will provide the servlet and JSP APIs). The best way to get the latest APIs is to start on Sun’s Products and APIs page at http://java.sun.com/products/ and find the appropriate API. And of course, the various de facto standard tools discussed in the second part of the book, like JUnit, Ant, and Hibernate, each have their own download locations as described in their respective chapters.
Sun distributes electronic documentation for all Java classes and methods in its javadoc HTML format. Although this documentation is sometimes sparse, it is still an excellent starting point when you need to know more about a particular Java package, class, method, or field. If you don’t already have the javadoc files with your Java distribution, see http://java.sun.com/docs/ for a link to the latest available version.
Finally, don’t forget O’Reilly’s Java web site (http://java.oreilly.com), which contains Java news and commentary. In addition, the O’Reilly network offers http://OnJava.com at http://www.onjava.com, which contains insightful tips and tricks for every level of Java programmer.
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