ISO7816 Smartcard / Java Card

I have two goals:
    1. using Java SE application, communicate with a smartcard using ISO 7816-4 commands, access card's filesystem, etc.
    2. write a card Applet and execute on the card's internal JCRE (Java Card Runtime Environment)

I'm wondering if anyone has been through this before, and could offer any hints / words of wisdom on how to get started, or share any recommendations for books or articles to get up to speed.

I've use an Arduino before to interface directly at the electrical level to the UICC's contacts and wrote some low-level C++ code to communicate at the byte-level.

This time I am wanting to use a card reader with a USB interface and javacard.framework interfaces and classes.