Complete Java 2 Certification Study Guide (Sybex)

This is my second review, and again, it's a java certification book. This was the book I studied from for my certification exam, and thanks to God, I did pretty well.

The book is well constructed, with a lot of info, and a lot of great exercises at the end of each chapter, plus a mock exam, and four sample exams on the accompanying CD. Unfortunately, the book is full of typos, and there are several mistakes with the exam and the review questions, which is quiet a shame. Those mistakes turn this book from a great book, to a "just quiet satisfactory" book. Some of the mistakes are clearly due to lack of revision of the changes done to this edition, so conflicts show up in a couple of places.

An example to what I mean is that starting from Java 5.0, the return type of the overriding method could be a child of the return type of the overridden method, and it's stated clearly in the middle of the chapter, but in the summary at the of the chapter, it's mentioned that the return type of the overriding method must be exactly the same as the overridden method, and can't even be a subclass of it (which is true for pre-5.0). This is clearly something that was in previous editions of the book, and wasn't changed where it was supposed to be. Several mistakes like this occur in the book.

The book is worth it's price, but only if you are going to be careful while studying from it, and check other sources, whether they are other books, or freely available resources on the internet. If you are going to study from one book, and one book only, and will not rely on any other resources, then this is not the book for you. The book is not a bad choice, but there are several other better study guides in the market, like Katherine's Sierra's and Bert Bate's SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 Study Guide from Osbourne. I checked it out, and it looks great.

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Buy SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 Study Guide from amazon

Head First Servlets & JSP

Studying is never fun for a lot of people, and reading technical books is always taken as a boring task by a lot of people. This will never be the case with any of the head first series of books.

The head first approach depends on a lot of images, since an image says more than a thousand words. It also depends on repeating the information in different styles, and dialogue like text.

Even though this might seem as if it's a very simple approach, but the result is amazing. The book is fun to read, full of information, and yet very simple. Never thought I would love to study that much again.

Now enough about the head first approach, and into the book itself. The book is very informative, and covers nearly everything in the exam. Very few subjects were not covered, but most of them are covered in the questions at the end of each chapter, with a reference to the place of the information in the specs.

Few mistakes are there (like any book in the market), but most of them are spelling mistakes. The O’Reilly website has a great errata page covering every single mistake in the book (even spelling and grammar mistakes).

A lot of topics covered in the book do not even appear in other books, and a lot of those come in the exam. I studied from that book, and got 94% in the exam. Great book, and really fun to read.

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