O'Reilly books are rarely for neophytes, but advanced users swear by them, and these will be no exception. Englander covers a hot Java subtopic for students, programmers, and professionals already familar with Java and object-oriented programming. He discusses events, event adapters, properties, persistence, java archive files, the BeanBox tool, property editors, ActiveX, and the java.beans Package. Flanagan's work is the book Java programmers want nearby when they are at the keyboard. A complete ready-reference work, this belongs in all collections supporting programmers. Java is a constantly changing language so Nutshell will be coming out often with new editions; always have the newest one on hand. Reese goes beyond simple applet design to relational databases, SQL, object-oriented database applications, application servers, and remote object manipulation. The examples used throughout the book are based on a banking application designed in Java.