Well, first for books, I suggest Apress's "Wireless
Java: Developing with J2ME, third edition" by Jonathan Knudsen.
Also at
http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/mobility/allarticles/ you will find a boat load of articles on how to do things in J2ME.
Oh, as far as the database thing, you can look into pointbase, which has a J2ME synch type thing for J2ME devices.
Good Luck.
Mark