Alaa Mohssen Nassef said
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 SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 Study Guide (Exam 310-055) (Certification Press Study Guides) from Osbourne. I checked it out, and it looks great.
Clayton said
This is a good book if you want to review and brush up on your knowledge for the SCJP 5.0 exam. With that being said, this is not the only material that you should use for the exam. The included CD has practice tests, but they are pretty weak. Many of the answers are incorrect and they are not even close to the difficulty of the actual exam. Do yourself a favor and buy the practice tests from Sun. Read the book, understand the topics, take the chapter tests on the CD and practice using Sun's practice tests. This is a painful exam and should not be taken lightly.
R. BHAGAVALDAS said
This book gives some basic idea to prepare for exam . Do your own research on topics like Generics , Threads , Collections etc and do some sample questions from Sun site.
This book gave me 75% material for exam , but dont rely completly on this book to pass the exam.
Learning Java said
I highly recommend this book whether you're going for the certification or not. It's well laid out, and well written. I'd recommend it to anyone wanting general knowledge of all the Java concepts. Only complaint is that the directions for the password to access the PDF version of the manual was wrong.
Russell C Frame said
The book does provide some high-level overview of Java 1.5 features, and that's where it stops. It doesn't provide anywhere near enough detail and application to be used as either a test preparation tool or as a language reference.
I regret purchasing this book and would not recommend it to anyone, even if it were free.
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