If you're studying for the SCJP exam, this is the book.

The structure of the book is beautiful, although the chapters vary wildly in length. Every paragraph has bold, visible headings for easy navigation, there are side-bars of all sorts everywhere, the most useful being the "exam watch" which highlight some tricky parts of the exam. At the end of every chapter, there is a tremendously useful self-test section, broad enough to encompass most of the important concepts and exam tricks for that particular chapter.

The self-tests are fantastic to strengthen your knowledge, make the concepts and ideas stick and, very importantly, learn to watch out for the exam tricks and traps: missing semi-colons, missing exception handling (I find that one so nasty. From the mock exams, it seems most common in complex threading questions), instance variable read from static main(), discrete ++ increment of a final variable deep inside a loop...

Additionally, the book caters as much as possible to different styles of learning (and reading!), by repeating and summarising the same information in diagrams, exercises, tables, and full recaps with bullet points at the end of every chapter. It all gets very handy as the exam gets closer and you don't have time to dive in deeply anymore.

I liked the sparse "on the job" sidebars to highlight some of the differences between real life and the exam. The humour in the book doesn't distract and can make the reading flow more pleasantly, though if you're not interested in a topic nothing will help (file I/O in Java kills me... Perl, Perl, Perl!)

Form-wise, the book is big and thus cumbersome, but surprisingly light so not too painful to carry around. PDFs of every chapter are provided on the accompanying CD, though I wasn't impressed when trying them on a friend's Sony e-reader.

Note for Linux users: the quiz/mock exam software on the CD runs fine under Wine (the only one out of 3 SCJP training software products I tried! None of them written in Java, funnily enough.)

I surface again, back from the land of studying and cramming. I decided to study for the SCJP (Sun Certified Java Programmer) exam, since that's what I spend my time doing at $dayjob (I might as well do it as best as I can!) Yesterday I passed the exam, yay!

I kinda like exams and certifications and courses in general (though if you'd asked me on Sunday I likely would have had something different to say!) They give a focus to my learning or simply give me the opportunity to look into a topic -- I'm interested in many many things and although I plan to learn about them all at some point, I can't learn everything at once. I was delighted when a JQuery course was organised in Tog earlier this year, it was the perfect opportunity to get a taste for it.

My usual process for learning a programming language usually starts like this:

• Do something. I first used Perl when I had a huge QIF export where I needed to change the dates from DD/MM/YY to MM/DD/YY. Or maybe it was the other way around.
• Or follow a tutorial to learn about it. Django looked so cool I had to try out their awesome, awesome tutorial.
• Sometimes I'll pick up a book on the topic if I see a good recommendation, like Learning Perl.

Very quickly though, I'll usually get interested in a problem or app and I'll drop the tutorials and books, simply using them as reference materials. It's the best way to learn, my practical knowledge expands but at the same time I'm likely to miss on things because I don't know they exist, or I don't realise I only have a partial understanding of a particular topic. In the end I only learn and see what I need for whatever task at hand, my knowledge can be fuzzy in places. I build a good feel for what's right and wrong but I don't necessarily understand precisely why. There could be a world of useful features I'm missing, especially if the new language has its own very specific quirks and shortcuts that don't always map one-to-one to other languages -- Perl comes to mind!

So that's why I enjoy studying for a certification or course, it gives me a different focus. Sometimes I even learn things that could end up being useful! ( ;) ) Some I'm sure will help me debug tough issues in the future, others I'll want to try out in my next project. I enjoy my new understanding of why some things work and why others don't.

Right now though, what I'm really looking forward to is having the time again to read other, non-Java related books!