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A Programmer's Guide to Java Certification, by Khalid Mughal and Rolf Rasmussen, is there to teach you from start to finish the domain roughly circumscribed by the Java Development Kit -- that is, the core language, the development tools such as Javadoc, the AWT, Swing, and so on. The goal is your subsequently passing the SCPJ2 Sun Certified Programmer for Java 2 Platform.
Mughal, an associate professor in Informatics at the University of Bergen, Norway, and his Java programming collaborator Rasmussen, who wrote the review questions and answers, are thoroughly familiar with their topic and are excellent at technological textbook writing. These gentlemen have produced a volume of sufficient depth to fill a two-credit college semester or more.
A Programmer's Guide to Java Certification is also nicely designed and produced. The layout is economical and the typographic conventions delightfully unexceptional. Illustrative content is handled especially adroitly. A wide variety of diagramming systems is correctly and scientifically applied to the various topics under discussion. Screenshots are used where appropriate, clipped to areas of interest and not used as page filler.
The example code is tastefully done. Illustrative mistakes are there within the good code, commented out with "Not OK" and other notations, just as they would be in maintenance code. Answers to the copious review questions are thoughtfully annotated. The book is nicely indexed. The only glaring omission is the lack of a bibliography.
A Programmer's Guide to Java Certification is targeted at the certification test, so you're being taught to pipe up with what Sun says is the answer before the buzzer sounds. There is little question regarding this volume that you're getting what is advertised and what you paid for. You can probably tell if you fall within the target group by looking at the book's cover illustration and asking yourself if the cluttered cubicle, newly and proudly emblazoned with a Java 2 Certification diploma, could be your workplace.
If you simply want to learn Java and use it professionally, understand that prepping for an exam is not quite the same thing as mastering a subject. Java professionals will tell you that there's a small subset of Java knowledge one needs to get to work productively. You can pick up the rest as you need it, if you're the type of person who learns quickly, which, after all, is what many programmers do for a living. (If certification isn't on your beat, you'll probably slide into Java easiest by reading Java in a Nutshell, http://www.ercb.com/brief/brief.0047.html, and by extensive visits to and downloads from Sun Java Developer's Connection, http://www.javasoft.com/jdc/.)
A Programmer's Guide to Java Certification is appropriate for computer science or computer engineering graduates who want to get cracking in the workplace, and for cubicle dwellers of the corporate world for whom the path of certification is the path to career enhancement. To those, and to others who need to pass certification or who have a personal need to know they could pass such a certification if they so desired, I commend that most diligent work, A Programmer's Guide to Java Certification.
-- Jack Woehr
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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.