First I would like to thank all the members and host of this web site.
I am totally new to
java and have a microsoft background so this post might give a good angle from a java newbie.
I picked at random a book at local bookstore to prepare for
SCJP 1.4 a month ago, QUE Sun java 2 programmer and developer exams written by Jamie Jaworski. I thought I was ready until I tried all the mock exams on different sites. All the info on the web especially this site helped me tremendously. I even had the wrong book as book was for 1.2. I took exam 2 weeks later on May, 13. I was prepared but expected to score between 70 and 80% and giving myself 10% chance of failure. So getting 72% was a relief. The book that I had purchased was not good enough to get you ready for the exam. I thought the exam was fair with some tricks.
I then switched to
servlets and
JSP. Again completely new to web application, this was very interesting studying. I got the SCWCD exam study guide by Deshmukh from this site recommendation. This time book was right on target, only negative is not showing enough the full class hierarchy of interfaces and classes. But the book is excellent, extremely well written. Took the
test today expecting to score between 80 and 90% and no chance to fail. So I was OK with 84% score. No surprise in exam, very close to this site mock exam and jdiscuss site except maybe for a couple of questions and more on
patterns than expected. I thought SCWCD was easier than SCJP.
I also purchased QUE Sun Java 2 Enterprise Edition Web Component Developer Exam. While the CD contains a decent mock exam, the book is pretty much worthless except for the DTD xml. I stopped reading 1/3 into it, just doing the questions at end of each chapter.