I'm buying it because I found clear, comprehensive literature explaining the fundamentals of the JVM severely lacking (suggestions welcome, however!).

You can start by playing with the ASM library. It's a java library to parse, generate and analyze JVM bytecode. Here's the official guide: http://download.forge.objectweb.org/asm/asm-guide.pdf

While learning how to use ASM you will also learn about the instruction set of the JVM. It also includes a disassembler that, given a .class file, outputs the java code necessary to generate that class using ASM.

Wow, thanks! You'd be amazed how long I spent looking for the advice which probably took you a couple of minutes to type.

That's an interesting observation, touching on the education discussion - that the bottleneck in advancing individual learning/human knowledge questions is still that of finding someone who knows the answer. Universities provide one solution by creating a "critical mass" of smart people nearby that you can go to for advice. And although maybe my academic network is lacking, I couldn't quite get the same quality of advice reaching out personally as what you gave. StackOverflow and news.YC help [1], but didn't quite give me the solution I was looking for either (until now).

If I was convinced I could consistently good advice from a service, I'd pay well for it - upwards of a thousand dollars a year, I'd imagine.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=451655