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Book Reviews

This book review was submitted by a DenverJUG member as part of the Book Review Program.

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REVIEWER

Dan Moore is a Java Certified Programmer, and has been coding Java on and off since 1998. After a stint at a consultancy in Boulder, he now provides services as an independent consultant. He thinks Java, Perl and UNIX are great technologies.

REVIEW

I used A Programmer's Guide to Java Certification as a study guide for achieving my certification as a Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform two years ago, so when I had the chance to review the second edition, I jumped at it. (Full disclosure: the publisher sent me the second edition to review). As I expected, I was again aghast and delighted at the level of detail, the exercises and the arrangement of this fine book.

Mughal and Rasmussen do a good job of covering all the nitty-gritty details that the certification requires. Whether the bit length of an int, the difference between overloading and overriding, or the order in which initializer expressions get executed, this book gives one enough detail to overwhelm the novice Java programmer, as well as cause more experienced programmers to scratch their heads and perhaps write a small program to verify what was read was valid.

While this second edition lacks the discussion of I/O and the abstract windowing toolkit of the previous edition (the current Java 1.4 certification exam no longer covers these areas), it has a fine set of chapters on some of the fundamental libraries and classes. My two favorite explications are the chapters on threads and strings. The threading chapter (Chapter 9), explains this complicated subject well enough to motivate more learning while not overwhelming the reader with detail. The String and StringBuffer section of Chapter 10 covers both how to use these classes and how incorrect string use can hurt memory and performance.

The exercises were crucial to my passing the certification test. Grouped at logical ends of chapter sections, the exercises break up the text and re-iterate the lessons learned in the previous sections. Answers to all exercises are in the back of the book. Also, a full mock exam is included at the back, as well as an annotated version of the certification exam requirements. Those exam requirements serve as a study guide -- both for the full Java 1.4 programmer certification test and the upgrade exam for programmers who already are certified in Java 2 but not for the 1.4 version. Reading over the mock exam definitely let me know what areas I'd need to study if I were taking the test again.

The arrangement of this book also is useful. A fine index and the logical progression through the features of the Java language eases the onslaught of detailed information, mentioned above. The extensive use of UML diagrams also was helpful.

However, this book is not for every Java programmer -- just those wanting to pass the certification. I wouldn't buy it if I wanted to learn to program in Java because the book doesn't cover general programming concepts. As the authors state in the preface, this is not a complete Java reference book. It covers only what is needed for the certification exam. Finally, the coding examples in the book don't resemble Java in the real world. This makes sense: The book teaches the fundamentals, and does not pretend to cover any of the higher-level APIs and concepts that are used in everyday programming