Hey, I have decent knowlegde in prograaming in Java, PHP and Python and I am looking to create a multiplayer, real-time game in Java. The part that I'm not very experienced at is networking. Are there any resources (preferably e-books), that you would recommend to someone like me?

The FAQ has a bunch of links. Recommended books include "TCP/IP Illustrated" by Stevens, and perhaps "Networked Virtual Environments" by Singhal.

Sadly for you, most references are C-based, not Java-based, because this is a systems programming area where Java really isn't that strong.

I'm going to mostly ignore the dig on java, to say that java is usually a better platform for networked servers. This is mainly due to it's good concurrency libraries and frameworks, which C/C++ for the most part lacks. (Boost really needs to die in a fire). I say that having worked on games and non game applications at the scale of billions of requests per day for several years.

Take a look at Netty. I also like using protocol buffers for messaging because it's already bit packed. UDT is something to look at also.

Akka is also a great platform for games. I've used Akka and Netty together to build large scale network servers that scale to tens of thousands of concurrent users.

Chris