Rating: 
Summary: Not a J2EE book
Review: The table of contents is attractive. But the coverage of each topic is very shallow. A lot of pages filled in with just fluff, not technical matter. Anyone with some years of J2EE experience can immediately see that the authors have never worked with J2EE technology. The book seems to be a collection of technical articles covering different aspects of J2EE technology. Also there is a lot of repetition of material. This book needs better editing.
But again this is a book covering the SCEA exam objectives, not J2EE.
I gave 3 stars just because: (i) the book makes an attempt to cover all the objectives of SCEA exam, and (ii) it includes the CD-ROM with the pdf version of book and practice tests.
As a practicing J2EE Architect/Developer I would recommend to read individual books that cover separate SCEA exam topics. Use the other SCEA book available in the market to summarize your study. It sounds like a lot but if you are experienced in J2EE it should be relatively easy. If you don't have J2EE experience then you may like this book but in reality you will remain as uninformed about J2EE after you finish reading this book as you were before reading it.
Some good books to follow: UML distilled, EJB book by Richard Monson(O'Reilley) or the one by Ed Roman, Java Security (O'Reilley),Design Patterns (Gang of four) or just follow the SCEA study guide by Mark and Simon.
Rating: 
Summary: Waste of time
Review: This book is terribly disorganized, repetitive and has numerous
errors. Unfortunately, it seems to be one of only 2 books
available on this certification. The only chapter that was worth
reading was the one on JMS. The rest of the book was eminently
unreadable. I suggest reading "UML Distilled", the
Design Patterns book by Gamma et al, and a good book on EJBs,
messaging and JCA, instead of wasting time and effort over
this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Sloppy writing and poor editing
Review: This book reads as if it were written entirely between the hours of 2&5AM. It is more like an 11th hour paper one would write all night in college to barely make the deadline, than a well structured book that is written and rewritten to achieve its purpose. This is disturbing since the goal of reading it is to obtain a certification in software architecture, a discipline that demands quality execution to ensure success. The book is repeative across chapters, unstructured within any given chapter, poorly defines concepts and terms and generally frustrates the reader with obfuscated and needlessly complicated sentence structure. The content can be moderately useful if the reader has the patience to read and re-read passages when necessary. A heavily edited and refined second edition could succeed if the need to dwell on poorly written passages and definitions was totally eliminated. Proper grammar and spelling would be a nice touch too.
Rating:
Summary: The book is a poor assembly of Sun tutorials
Review: This is a poorly edited and incoherently put together from SUN's J2EE tutorials. What a shame.
Rating:
Summary: Waste of Time, Money and Energy
Review: This is a waste book that makes you go to sleep in 2 minutes. the content is poorly organized, the authors don't seem to have any knowledge of the topics covered for the exam. This book totally is a waste of your time, money and energy.
Rating:
Summary: Waste of Time, Money and Energy
Review: This is a waste book that makes you go to sleep in 2 minutes. the content is poorly organized, the authors don't seem to have any knowledge of the topics covered for the exam. This book totally is a waste of your time, money and energy.
Rating:
Summary: Poorly Organized
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: real good start towards SCEA certification
Review: This one brings you up to speed w the SCEA 310-051 exam. It has practice exams (3) which are fairly comprehensive. The CD-ROM is valuable for someone on the go; it has pdf's of the chapter content. The J2EE stuff is good for introduction and background. Other books may be needed to fill the gaps. Good ROI on this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Clear explanations and the right focus on exam objectives
Review: This study guide is the second book on SCEA available from the market. It covers all the main topics for the SCEA 310-051 exams, with step-by-step instruction, and 2 sets of practice exercises. Chapters concentrate on the basic J2EE concepts, common architectures, legacy connectivity, EJB and its container model, protocols, applicability of J2EE, design patterns and messaging. Besides that, a J2EE case study is provided in the last chapter. The companion CD-ROM contains two sets of practice tests and a pdf-version of the study guide. For a SCEA candidate, it is normally a challenge of using UML and J2EE together in the SCEA part 2. Unfortunately, this topic is missing in the book. The J2EE case study chooses a real-life J2EE architecture, which involves legacy connectivity on Mainframe. This example is absolutely helpful on the SCEA part 2. However, it would be better if the authors could illustrate the pros and cons of specific design approaches. Near 100 challenging practice questions are provided in the Mock Exam. They are closely modeling the format, tone, topics, and difficulty of the real exam. Since it's the one of the only two books available, I suggest you go through this book. However, you should also learn the specific subjects from practice or from other corresponding books.
|
