Vital Statistics

Title Java Certification Exam Guide for Programmers and Developers Author Barry Boone Publisher McGraw-Hill New York, New York http://www.books.mcgraw-hill.com/ Copyright 1997 ISBN ISBN 0-0791-3657-5 Pages 704 Price $54.95

Java Certification Exam Guide

• Basic elements of a Java source file and their ordering.
• Subclassing and casting classes.
• Keywords.
• Garbage collection.
• Exceptions (try, catch, finally), syntax for throwing, requirements for overriding methods in a subclass.
• Program control flow constructs.
• Constructors for classes: overloading, use of super and this.
• Data types and the range of their values.
• Arrays and their initialization.
• Methods: overloading, overriding, class versus instance methods, object references to base and derived classes when a derived object is assigned to a parent object.
• Operators, including the unique >>> and the overriding equals().
• Math and string classes and their functions (analogous to the run-time library of C).
• Input/output, classes and interfaces, including serialization (as Java 1.1 feature).
• Threads: creation and launching.
• GUI, including components (including fields/formats of the more popular classes: checkbox, choice, list, button, but no discussion of menu, which doesn't appear to be on the exam either), containers, layout managers (and their chaining), special functions for drawing lines and shapes and their use in overriding the paint() method which is the principal method for displaying graphics in Java.
• Events, both the basic Java 1.0.2 events, including fields and propagation up the class hierarchy and the changes for Java 1.1, including Listener interfaces to detect the occurrence of specific event subclasses and the methods for accessing their fields.
• Embedding applets into web pages (which is fairly trivial).
• New features in Java 1.1: inner classes, anonymous classes, JAR (Java Archive) files, JavaBeans (components specially designed for GUI manipulation, typically inside a visual application builder tool).

Additional topics included for the Developer's Exam (but which are treated too superficially to be of use without additional texts):

• Advanced GUI, including fonts and colors.
• Accessing databases, including Java database connectivity (JDBC, including bridge translator to ODBC) and remote method invocation (RMI).
• Network programming, including rudimentary code for socket creation and a fairly extensive program for establishing single and multiclient servers.

The book's strongest points are: it has plenty of good code examples; it highlights specific subject objectives, key concepts, tips, warnings (this is most useful for rapid identification in support of last minute cramming); and it provides plenty of good questions on each subject (including two full sample exams), as well as abundant programming exercises, with well explained solutions for each. The questions are similar to those on the exam, both in subject and level of difficulty.

The principal deficiency of the book is that the subjects are not presented in any logical order, so that it is impossible to learn the language from this book alone (which is consistent with the authors' intended audience). Also, the programming constructs are not compared and contrasted to those in C, which is likely to be the programming background of most of the book's audience. And finally, the book cannot serve as a reference because of insufficient definitions (for example, the book discusses the minimal constructors of BorderLayout and GridLayout but only alludes to the fact that both can be offset in from the container border without giving the syntax of the constructor for that purpose) and insufficient class hierarchy charts.

-- Peter Gottlieb

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Explanation of ERCB rating scale: No stars = unacceptable, 1 Star = marginal, 2 Stars = average, 3 Stars = above average, 4 Stars = exceptional.

A book like Boone's Java Exam Certification Guide is essential for an ordinary mortal trying to pass the programmers exam without actually taking a course from Sun. There is at least one alternative book: Java 1.1 Certification Study Guide, by Simon Roberts and Phillip Heller (Sybex, 1997, $44.95, ISBN 0-7821-2069-5), which has a more logical organization by topics, starting with the simple and building to the most complex, so that it can serve as a textbook for proficient programmers unfamiliar with Java. This potential teaching purpose is supported by more complete explanations of each topic, including very effective use of figures. The book also has a complete reference of classes and methods (running several hundred pages). This extra attention to instructional material comes at the cost of a much smaller complement of programming examples and reader questions and exercises. This latter deficit is partly compensated by the CD-ROM which contains a complete simulation of the certification exam, in addition to the JDK 1.1.3 (which should have fewer bugs than the 1.1.1). Roberts and Heller claim to be directly involved in the preparation of the exams, so one might hope that their questions will be more representative of what is actually on the exam (although they are certainly more limited).