Java 2 Certification Training Guide

This book is atrocious. It is very expensive and is completely valueless for passing the exam. It provides no real information, rather it is an endless checklist of things that you need to know to pass the exam. Sun provides this for free in their test objectives list. The mock exam is exactly that, a mockery of an exam. The test engine barely works (I had to modify several files to get it to work) and the questions are poorly phrased and confusing. I would strongly advice anyone who wants to pass the test to save their money and purchase another book instead....

So far I have read 6 chapters of Part I. There is a typo or an outright mistake on nearly every page. Semantics of the language are described either incorrectly or in terms too vague to even be wrong. Whoever typeset the thing put "fi" and "fl" ligatures in the monospaced code typeface, and after about 100 pages forgot to indicate syntactic metavariables with italics. When I read others' reviews saying that the real exam questions are much harder than those in this book, and then I find that the ones in the book actually have incorrect answers given in some cases, I lose all faith in the rest. I guess you get what you pay for.

Used this book exclusively to study for the J2CP test. The example questions were outdated and nowhere near the level of complexity found on the actual test. I passed, but not because of this book (5+ yrs experience w/ Java).

The developer certification section was short on content. Now that Sun has beefed up the Architect exam, I wouldn't trust the Architect section in this book.

The book is good at giving you a solid understanding of the Java language basics. However, the purpose of buying a book like this is to prepare for and pass the certification tests, and there is no hope for someone with little experience to pass any of the exams using this book.

This book is adequate as a supplement as you prepare for the exam , but it is not exceptional. There were a couple questionable topics, in particular, be cautious of the explanation it gives of polymorphism. The coverage of the Developer exam is very brief, but if you are buying the book only to pass the programmer exam, you should probably do fine. Personally, I found The Complete Java 2 Certificaion Study Guide to be clearer and more effective.

In preparation for the Java 2 Programmer exam, I worked through this, and two other texts; "A Programmer's Guide to Java Certification" by Mughal and Rasmussen, and "Java 2 Exam Prep" by Bill Brogen. This book, in my opinion, was the weakest of the three. I would only recommend it as a supplemental source of practice questions once you have worked through another certification guide (or two).

Although this book does cover all of the major areas of the exam (test# 310-025), it is missing quite a bit of the syntactical minutia that the exam is so notorious for containing. It is also my opinion that this book does not contain enough "debugging" type review questions - where you a presented with a block of code and asked what (if anything) is syntactically incorrect. This type of question wass very common on the version of the exam that I recently took.

If you are preparing for the exam, I think your best bet is "A Programmer's Guide to Java Certification" by Mughal and Rasmussen. If you reach a point at which you can answer all of the review and practice questions in this book, you are probably more than prepared to take a shot at certification.

I'd also like to recommend the three Marcus Green practice tests (available from javaranch.com). They are an excellent last-minute study tool and an accurate indicator of how well you will do on the actual exam. My actual score turned out to be a few points higher than my average score on these practice tests.

Good Luck!!!