Kris’ Book Reviews

Certification a mark of a good programmer or just a paper that anyone can get? Whichever definition you prefer take a look at this short review of a book that helps achieving such certificate.

The book starts with a short summary of all Sun Certification exams with a more detailed explanation of the Sun Certified Programmer Exam. Besides those reviews, first chapter shows how to study for the exam in an efficient way.

Review of Garmin Zumo 550 Motorcycle GPS Navigator

The rest of the book is filed with information essential for passing the exam. More over, the content is very useful in a day to day Java and its library knowledge. For example, I don’t know how about you but I didn’t have a clue that there is an Arrays class with quite a few methods helping with array types.

The text itself is well structured, information the reader should read more carefully is shown in boxes called Exam Watch. There are also similar paragraphs/boxes with text not related to the exam (called on the job).

Furthermore, every chapter ends with a summary of the study material, followed by a 2 minute drill which is a big help when you gave the exam in few hours and want to recall the material quickly. Finally, every chapter has a 10 to 20 exam questions with detailed answers. This test has similar difficulty level as the real one so you can test yourself with real life exam questions regarding the chapter that was just read. And if you thought that its enough, you get a CD with two mock exams (lasting 2 hours, the test software gives a feel of the exam structure) to test your skills even more.

What about the writing style of authors ? It’s superb! When there is a difficult subject Kathy and Bert insert a hilarious text and everything starts to look brighter Even without the witty jokes, Java language specifics are very clearly explained.

Suming it all up, this book is (in my opinion of course) a must have for every serious Java programmer even if one doesn’t wan’t to take the SCJP exam, it deciphers some Java inner workings. And as for the exam, by studying from the previous book for the 1.4 exam I managed to get a high score (only 2 missed answers), so I think it’s a good recommendation

Rating 9/10

Buy (or just look at amazon comments) SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 Study Guide (Exam 310-055) (Certification Press Study Guides)

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 10th, 2007 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Book Reviews, Programming, Katherine Sierra, Bert Bates . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.