I know that people on this site are highly biased toward the books by K &B, which is fine. However, I wanted to share the info that the Author's Press (APress) has already released a new
SCJP Study Guide by Dr. Paul Sanghera, and is already selling on Amazon. This is the same author who wrote the SCBCD Exam Study Kit published by Manning.
The SCJP Study Guide by Paul Sanghera, in my opinion, adds a new vartiety to the collection of SCJP books. The K&B book is good, but it's only good for the advanced programmers (It's noted in the book Introduction), whereas Sanghera's book can be used by the beginneres as well. Of course the advanced programmers who want to pass the exam can also use this book because after all it's the same exam. With the inclusion of introductory chapter 1 and the way the material is presented, a beginner in
Java can learn Java programming and prepare for the exam at the same time.
The author correctly notices thsat the SCJP exam is very code intensive. So, the book presents hundreds of complete code examples discussed all through the book, and for which the code is available for download. You can run these examples and experiment with them to get comfortable with reading and understanding code in a limited amount of time in the exam.
I also liked the Quick Exam Prep appendix, and the appendix to install Java environment could also be useful for beginners. The advanced programmers can ignore Chapter 1 and Appendix A (for installation) and the book is just for them as well...because the style (logical learning sequence) that the author uses works for all: advanced and beginners.
The book aalso gives useful info for the folks who are considering to taake the upgrade exam. The mapping of the upgrade exam objectives to the chapters in the book is provided in an appendix.
I like the book very much and recommend it to all who either want to take the SCJP exam, or just want to learn basics of Java programming.
For more info, you can check the book out at Amazon.