Published: Thu 24 June 2010
In Tech .
tags: book review exams java
If you're studying for the SCJP exam, this is **the**
book .
The structure of the book is beautiful, although the chapters vary
wildly in length. Every paragraph has bold, visible headings for easy
navigation, there are side-bars of all sorts everywhere, the most useful
being the "exam watch" which highlight some tricky parts of the exam. At
the end of every chapter, there is a tremendously useful self-test
section, broad enough to encompass most of the important concepts and
exam tricks for that particular chapter.
The self-tests are fantastic to strengthen your knowledge, make the
concepts and ideas stick and, very importantly, learn to watch out for
the exam tricks and traps: missing semi-colons, missing exception
handling (I find that one so nasty. From the mock exams, it seems most
common in complex threading questions), instance variable read from
static main(), discrete ++ increment of a final variable deep inside a
loop...
Additionally, the book caters as much as possible to different styles of
learning (and reading!), by repeating and summarising the same
information in diagrams, exercises, tables, and full recaps with bullet
points at the end of every chapter. It all gets very handy as the exam
gets closer and you don't have time to dive in deeply anymore.
I liked the sparse "on the job" sidebars to highlight some of the
differences between real life and the exam. The humour in the book
doesn't distract and can make the reading flow more pleasantly, though
if you're not interested in a topic nothing will help (file I/O in Java
kills me... Perl, Perl, Perl!)
Form-wise, the book is big and thus cumbersome, but surprisingly light
so not too painful to carry around. PDFs of every chapter are provided
on the accompanying CD, though I wasn't impressed when trying them on a
friend's Sony e-reader.
Note for Linux users: the quiz/mock exam software on the CD runs fine
under Wine (the only one out of 3 SCJP training software products I
tried! None of them written in Java, funnily enough.)