Rating: 
Summary: A complete book for certification
Review: Actually not for just certification, it helps in many other daily situations for developers, msny topics are covered in simplicity, so they can be understood easily, also there are self test at the end of each chapter, pdf exams on the cd to cover all the topics and give you an idea what to expect in the exam.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: At the first glance, the book appeared to cover all of the certification objectives. But to my disappointment, I found that the book is very badly written. The concepts are not organized logically and a lot of sentences are repeated verbatim. The authors keeps on rambling about various things without making any clear point. Don't waste your money on this one.
Rating:
Summary: a writer from Santa Monica CA
Review: Finally a book that fits its title. This one covers the SCEA 310-051 exam well. It has lots of useful practice exercises; usuable even for the oh so critical technical interview. The chapters concentrate on the exam objectives as published by SUN. It complements the the "J2EE Unleashed" book (by the same authors) which is focused on the J2EE development life cycle and has some great real life examples. The CD-ROM is valuable in and of itself as it has two practice exams and pdf's of the chapter content. The J2EE case study is a real-life J2EE architecture is a good example of a service style SOA application involving connectivity on Mainframe.
This is a worthwhile purchase.
Rating:
Summary: Very poorly written
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Very poorly written
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: What a shame
Review: I bought this book after reading other osborne's certification books. I thought the quality would be similar, but it's a shame I was totally wrong. ...After seeing some people rating this book with 5 stars I think they haven't been fair. If you pass the exam it doesn't mean the book is good, maybe you already had some experience on the subject.
I DON'T think this book is worth the money it costs. At most I would buy it sharing costs with some friends so that we all can read the pdf version. Finally, and just to make it clear, the CD does NOT contain 2 sample exams. It only contains one exam and after registering at osborne you'll be given a chance for a second one. Slight difference. Both exams have some ambiguous questions and wrong ones...
Rating: 
Summary: Many Mistakes and Irrelevant Content
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Many Mistakes and Irrelevant Content
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Primary material for Architect exam part1 preparation
Review: I have actually taken the exam before buying this book. But I had a chance to take a look in the book stores. I know how it was terrible in collecting the resources. This book saves a lot of time.Most of the topics are well covered from ground up to detail so that even the beginners can learn the basic concepts if they are not so strong. There are also examples codes everywhere in the book. This would be really help if you have not been extensively in the J2ee development.I would say that this book covers 90% of the topic asked in the exam. But for topics like DNS round robin you have to get materials from the forum.Definitely we can't expect everything from the author as certain topics are really in general(common architectures), so that SUN can ask anything. So I would appreciate the author for taking so much effort.
Rating: 
Summary: Not so great; has errors, repeated content, unorganized...
Review: I have been working with Java and J2EE for 5 years now, and after reading the majority of this book, and I can honestly say that most of the content in this book is easily obtained from the Sun Tutorials and also the J2EE specifications for each individual J2EE technology (EJB, JTS, JNDI, JCA, etc). I was practically flying through the chapters because I knew the material. In general, I was most dissapointed by the following... Individual Chapters are unorganized
The authors of this book wrote the chapters using very strange methods. They often jump around topics, leaving the reader confused. Content is repeated, wasting pages...
This was very annoying. Every single chapter contains sections that are often repeated over and over again. To give an example, the chapter on design patterns contains a table that names each GoF design pattern with a brief description, but to my surprise, this table is repeated 3 times in the same chapter!! The only explanation I have for this is that the authors wanted to "fluff" the book so as to increase its size, making it appear as though it is very comprehensive, but believe me, it's not. To give another example, the chapter on EJB's contains a code snippet which actually dedicates about 5 to 6 pages of the book to display the output of the code, which is simply a bunch of wasted println statements. Now I ask you, what will you learn from reading this code output? Absolutely nothing, plain and simple, and that should be obvious because this is an architect exam, not a programmers exam. Sample questions too easy, contain errors
Each chapter has about 15 to 20 sample questions that are very easy, especially for someone who has written a distributed system using J2EE. I will also say that a small amount of the sample questions are flat out wrong and contain errors. Ok, those are the bad things about this book. Now, here are the good things... Currently, there are not too many books to choose from when preparing for the Sun Enterprise Archictect exam, so this book is a good start, but don't stop there! :-) There is also a CD that is packaged with this book that contains 2 practice exams (multiple choice) that are conducted online and are very similar to the way the actual exam is conducted, and the questions are difficult and you will no doubt get creamed on these questions when you take the practice exam the first few times. So, to conclude, this book should be a small part of your arsenal when preparing for the SCEA Part 1 exam, but you should also read other material, you will definitely need it. [...] Good luck, SAF
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