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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

Renee Dopplick is a Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for the Java Platform Enterprise Edition Technology. She passed with 95%.

REVIEW

The Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for J2EE Study Guide by Paul Allen and Joseph Bambara reflects the desire to produce an all-encompassing book to prepare for the certification, an ambitious goal. Unfortunately, the book arduously labors to provide comprehensive and quality information relevant to the certification and ultimately cries out for a revised edition with corrections, clarifications, logical sequencing, smoother transitions, and improved coverage of certification topics.

As the ultimate certification preparation guide, the book fails. The book's value resides in prodding the reader to discover the book's errors, what parts to avoid, and omissions. For this fact alone, the study guide is not recommended for novices as the sole primer to prepare for the certification. The study guide is worthwhile as an additional study aide for those already knowledgeable of the J2EE architecture and those seeking validation of their knowledge through critical analysis and further research.

Each chapter starts with a list of certification objectives, followed by explanatory text of concepts related to those objectives. At the end of each chapter, the reader is given a few short essay questions with answers provided directly under the questions, a quick-summary called "two-minute drill" that revisits important points and terms, and a few sample multiple-choice questions.

Rather than order the book according to the standard list of objectives provided by Sun as outlined in the first chapter, the authors regroup the certification topics into a structure that is choppy and inconsistent in depth of discussion and review. For example, the certification topic of "Protocols" is shoe-horned in with "Common Architectures" in Chapter 2, yet all information about protocols is omitted from the summary of critical concepts, the exercises, and the sample test questions. Likewise, the book jumps around in an incoherent presentation of the applicability of J2EE in Chapter 4 and the related discussion of EJBs in Chapter 7, which together represent the critical core areas of understanding required for the certification.

In striving to make the book more "friendly", the authors use an unusual mixture of layman's vocabulary and uncommon terms, some of which are questionable both in their use and description. For instance, instead of using "coupling" and "cohesion", the authors use "brittleness" and "spaghetti-like". They also introduce terms such as "surface area" and "boundaries," which are distracting and misleading, particularly given the inconsistencies between the definitions and corresponding examples.

The coverage of security is the one area where this book could have been extremely valuable. Unfortunately, the book does not effectively convey supporting architectural details, such as the relevancy of security in relation to protocols and common architectures, and potential "breach" scenarios.

"Exam Watch" alerts, touted by the book's cover as helpful identifiers of troublesome exam topics, merely provide referrals to obvious information. For example: "This objective is required by the certification exam." and "For detailed information on these exams, refer to (the Sun website)." This isn't exactly what I would call advice arising from "thorough post-exam research," as the publisher claims.

The multiple-choice sample questions appear to be provided largely by a third-party vendor, LearnKey (There is an ad on the inside front cover.) rather than by the authors. Some questions are clearly incorrect, although this may be attributed to an attempt to alter the questions appearing in the book so that when you see them later in the master exam, the questions aren't identical. Other questions don't map to content in the chapter and not all questions provide remediation. If you have searched for available questions online, you'll recognize quite a few of the questions, even some verbatim.

The Master Exam on the CD was useful for identifying knowledge gaps, but not necessarily worth the price of the book. The allotted time for the practice exam is not correct. The downloadable "Bonus Exam" contains duplicate questions from the Master Exam on the CD.

Given that the book is more often accurate than not and given that it does provide relevant information with some meaningful details, the book might be worth your time once a revised, better-edited second edition is published.