9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Sufficient, worth the price, you'll pass, but it really isn't very "good"., January 25, 2006
This review is from: Complete Java2 Certification Study Guide (Paperback)
If you memorize everything in this book, you'll pass with NO flying colors. There are typos and mistakes in the examples. There are worse typos and mistakes in the chapter review questions. The sample exams on the CD are just one exam repeated 4 or 5 times, but with extremely slight changes. All the reviews and sample tests together do not come anywhere near to imitating the questions on the test (SCJP). Once you have memorized everything in the text and examples (correcting all the typos and errors along the way), and can answer all the review and sample test questions 100%, you're still only going to get a minimal passing grade on the SCJP test.
This book is very, VERY helpful. However, be sure to do additional studying outside of this book. And beware that some of the exam questions on the CD are actually programmed incorrectly, and selecting the correct answer will be marked as INCORRECT. The 'correct' answer they give you will in some cases actually conflict with the explaination for that answer.
Very poor execution, but nonetheless is a very good BASIS for study to pass the SCJP.
I have not yet taken the SCJD, but the text for it (starting at chapter 10) leave a lot to be desired. Again, it's a good starting point, but you should do more studying and lots (!) of Swing/RMI/Threading practice in beyond what the book covers, before taking your test. It's description of RMI does leave a lot to be desired.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Useful but deeply flawed, January 21, 2006
This review is from: Complete Java2 Certification Study Guide (Paperback)
Firstly, let's be clear what this book is - and is not.
It is NOT a teach-yourself-java book. It is assumed that you already know Java. The goal of this book is to get you through the SCJP exam. To pass the exam, you need to know by rote many details that you would just look up when you are actually programming (I speak as someone who has done this professionally for many years.)
Some of the criticisms in other reviews may be because the reviewers expected to learn Java from scratch with this book. EG the coverage of Generics is minimal (6 pages by the way - not 2 paragraphs as someone stated); but you do not need huge knowledge of Generics in the exam.
The book is on the whole well-organised to cover the information you do need to know. I would say this book could be ONE useful tool - but do not rely on it entirely. I chose it because I wanted to do the latest version of the SCJP exam (Java 1.5 also known as Java 5). At the time this was the ONLY book of its kind covering the 1.5 features.
If there are now other books I would recommend you consider those. Why? Because as others have said, this book is full of annoying errors. Mostly these are not too serious - and you can usually spot them if you are intelligent enough not to automatically believe everything you read. EG. A question has 4 answers A-D. The book tells you the correct answer is E. Yes there are lots like that. In fact most of the errors seem to be in the tests & answers. (I guess this keeps you alert!)
There are also some real howlers. EG "the method clone() is declared in the Cloneable interface". NO - it is declared by class Object - Cloneable is a 'marker' interface without any methods. Or "the Swing GUI event-handling thread is a daemon thread". This is simply false, and you can prove that in 5 minutes by writing a simple program to check. Luckily there aren't too many like this (or I failed to spot them!)
The other warning I would give is that although the questions are not much easier than the real ones, they are much quicker to read & understand. I always completed these tests in about 2/3 of the allocated time. In the real exam I only just had time to finish all the questions.
Interestingly, Sybex have an errata page on their website, but there are hardly any errors documented. I have seen other websites that list the errata and complain that they have been sent to Sybex but ignored. I expect Sybex are simply too embarrassed!
The last part of the book contains hints for the NEXT java exam - the Java Developer exam. There is actually some pretty good advice in there. EG don't make your application too clever - you will probably lose points instead of gaining them.
Overall, my advice is to get a better book that does the same job - if you can.
Oh yeah - I got 79% which is a very comfortable pass.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but could use more examples involving new material, June 27, 2005
This review is from: Complete Java2 Certification Study Guide (Paperback)
I passed SCJP 5.0 by reading this book. However, some of the new material is covered in isolation. I'd like to see more examples, such as of interaction between method overloading/overriding and variable arguments, interaction between overloading/overriding and Generics, and examples of overloading/overriding combined with boxing/unboxing.
Also, the password provided for the electronic version of the book on the CD is invalid (but see errata on Sybex web site for the solution to this problem).
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