1.1 Overview of the Book

Lest there be any confusion on this point, we want to be quite clear: This book is about using Java and SQL together. It is not a book about SQL per se that is, you shouldn't expect to learn all about SQL (neither the SQL standard nor any specific product's implementation) in this book. There exist any number of books covering SQL thoroughly, and we encourage you to take advantage of them if your knowledge of SQL is limited. Neither is this a book about Java; there are considerable resources available for your use in learning that language, and what you get out of this book will benefit considerably if you have a working knowledge of Java. Instead, we will show you, sometimes in great detail and other times in a sketchier form, a number of ways in which you can use the power of SQL and the power of Java together to build your applications.

In this book, we're going to cover a great variety of material, for the very pertinent reason that there are several effective ways of combining Java and SQL in applications. Some of these methods have been available since shortly after Java exploded onto the scene in the mid-1990s; others were developed over a period of two or three years after that. No doubt, other ideas are still gestating as this book is being written; we can't cover those today, but perhaps a future edition will close the gap.

In Section...