Book excerpt: Microsoft's Visual J++ has emerged as the development environment of choice for programmers building Java applications and applets. This book provides all the essential information necessary for Java programmers who want to maximize the benefits of the Visual J++ development environment for fast programming and debugging. Some of the topics covered include: the Java language, graphics and animation, the Java API hierarchy, the abstract windowing toolkit, Java applet wizards, debugging, and project management. It also covers ActiveX integration which makes it possible to access databases and existing applications. This book covers the latest version of Visual J++.