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O'Reilly & Associates has made its name publishing gritty documentation of Unix innards, especially application programming interface (API) references. Database Programming with JDBC and Java follows this heritage in the excellent roadmap of the java.sql.* package, which fills a solid quarter of this thin book. All the variables and methods have clear annotations that will help you solve problems. The rest of the book is a mixed bag.

Reese opens with a discussion of SQL, then proceeds to explain client-server architecture and three-tier database access. In describing JDBC, he provides clear program listings on how to connect to a database, get information from it, add information to it, and delete parts of it. While Reese does a fine job of explaining these critical tasks, the book doesn't come with a disc to save you from typing them manually (though you can get them by FTP from the O'Reilly site). This book continues to guide the reader through query optimization and interface design. The book focuses a lot of attention on Remote Method Invocation (RMI), walking the reader through the creation of a "banking" application that illustrates all the important JDBC operations. This book has the best JDBC application programming interface (API) reference around, which alone is worth the price of the book. However, you will probably want to supplement this book with a better JDBC tutorial. [via]