Update

Well, it's been an interesting summer to say the least. I left my employers with a wad of cash, which I spent some on training - I went up to Glasgow to do the Java Programming Language 275 course at Eclectic training. Since then I've consolidated somewhat on what I was taught - much of what I did up in Glasgow was stuff I'd already covered, but for a couple of areas which I don't think the course covered adequately - JDBC, Swing & Threads.

However, I've got MySQL installed on my MacBookPro, so I'll look into extending the existing coursework from the Glasgow course so that it creates a thread which attempts to connect to a MySQL database via JDBC, and reports back any problems it encounters.