My mistake, I should remember that you are a beginner to all this. Sorry about that.
Ok, so as far as default "built into the language" serialization goes, java is the only option, it is terrible (as I mentioned above) but it is easy to work with and get started with. Once you learn how to deal with external libraries, everything I said above should make sense.
Ok, so lets talk about libraries. One of the greatest strengths of java is the fact that it has one of the largest open source communities out there. That means that if you have a problem you are trying to solve, chances are very high that 10 people have already solve the problem 10 different ways so you get the pleasure of picking a solution and using it.
As far as the language goes, Java doesn't really have any sort of external library manager built into the language (bummer) but it does have several decent package managing systems written by other people (yay!).
In general, java has great tools and IDEs. You do yourself a disservice IMO not using them if you aren't already. We use netbeans at my work, but I've heard great things about Intellij and (to a lesser extent) eclipse. I would suggest downloading one of them and start to get familiar with it.
I can't speak for others, but my company uses maven for dependency management (downloading files needed to build and run a program) it works pretty decently and netbeans has really good integration with it. If you go the netbeans maven route (new project, maven project, etc) you can simply add new functionality to your project by adding blocks like so
Code:
<dependency>
<groupId>com.google.guava</groupId>
<artifactId>guava</artifactId>
<version>18.0</version>
</dependency>
Throw these in the "dependencies" block when you hit the clean and build icon maven will automatically go out and download these libraries for you. Alternatively, you can look into setting up and running maven from the command line. (or even looking at other build systems like gradle... though I would stear clear of Ant personally).
Alternatively, you can use a lib folder and direct the java compiler to it while building You can dump all your dependencies into it.
One of the keys to java development is getting comfortable with reading lots and lots of documentation. So get ready to spend a lot of your time in websites that looks like this
http://docs.guava-libraries.googlecode.com/git-history/v18.0/javadoc/index.html
sqlite is a local database that is very fast and pretty simple to work with. It is a sql database, but it is built mainly to be a single user database rather than a database for a whole company.