Many Mistakes and Irrelevant Content

I bought this book despite the other poor reviews on amazon. I was hopeful that the other reviewers were just being too harsh. But after reading the first couple chapters, it became clear that the other reviewers were being charitable. This book is filled with errors and is poorly organized. The worst error I've spotted is on p16. The book says that "The current version of the SCEA exam tests your knowledge of J2EE 1.3 API." In fact, at the time I'm writing this review, and certainly at the time they wrote the book, the current version of the exam is still testing the J2EE 1.2 API. That is pretty bad when the course authors don't even know which version of J2EE they should be writing about. It also would be quite detrimental and confusing to readers who would assume they should be studying topics that were added in the J2EE 1.3 version. In many places, the book also does not seem to be well synched with the topics, approach, and vocabulary of the exam. Some chapters seemed almost irrelevant to the exam. If you buy this book, you should only consider it a supplement to help give you a general idea of what you need to study. I would suggest doing most of your studying with other books or resources.

Very poorly written

I agree with the other reviewers that this book is very poorly written. After reading the first few chapters and have found a half dozen spelling mistakes and several sentences that don't make sense, you have to know that this book was rushed out the door.What's worse than that for your typical SCEA candidate is the amount of time that is wasted with repetitive or unnecessary information. I've got very little time in my day to read books, and the last thing I need is an author inserting fluff around the core material just to make the book look bigger. This "user-friendly" writing style is best kept in the "X For Dummies" series, and kept out of books for busy professionals.The other SCEA book (Cade and Roberts) is a much better buy. I'd recommend buying only that one and supplementing it with other subject-specific books (EJB, UML, Patterns) instead of wasting your money and time with this one.

Poorly Organized

This is one of those books that looks good on the store shelf. It appears to cover all of the certification objectives. It has a CD that promises mock exams. Unfortunately the book is very poorly written. It doesn't seem as though the authors really understand what they are talking about, and instead are cobbling together material from other sources: Starting with the introductory material, the descriptions of the concepts of architecture and design are terrible muddled. Also, I have never read such poor descriptions of the GoF design patterns. The EJB material is scattered and poorly organized. Finally a bunch of mostly useless Java code is thrown in, presumably to make the book seem more authoritative. Througout, this book seems to repeat the same material over and over again. The back of the book promises an "exam watch - warnings based on thorough post-exam research identifying the most troublesome exam topics." This sounds useful, but appears nowhere in the book as far as I can tell. I would suggest simply buying the Sun press study guide by Mark Cade and Simon Roberts. It is not "complete" but the material is very well written, and you can go on the Web to find other people's study notes and mock exams to complement your review of the material.