I was pleasantly surprised this morning when browsing through the latest BCS (British Computer Society) journal "IT now" to find a page of "web site reviews".
Covered in this issue are
www.top-consultant.com (8/10),
www.wikipedia.com (7/10) and
www.javaranch.com (9/10).
In a Sentence
Anyone studying for one of Sun's Java Certification exams will benefit from a visit to this very useful site.
The Verdict
This covers almost all aspects of Java programming with tutorials, book reviews and code samples, but concentrates particularly on Sun certification.
The tutorials are aimed at beginners and provide a very practical introduction with numerous coding tasks to complete. After Java fundamentals comes classes and objects, before a move on to the more advanced topics of servlets and JDBC.
One of the most outstanding parts of the site is the discussion forum area, which has a huge number of categories covering various aspects of Java programming and different types of Sun certification.
All forums have large numbers of participants from all over the world, both asking questions and contributing hints and tips, so if you do have any Java-related difficulties, you should be able to get an answer here.
The forums provide a friendly and informal atmosphere with plenty of help for beginners and experts alike. The site also has FAQs, lists of links and mock exams for the various certifications.
There are printable mock exams and online versions that select random questions from a pool. This has proved very helpful to me, and presumably lots of others, judging from the forum entries when studying for Sun's exams.
Nick Dunn MBCS