I'm so glad that's out of the way. Between this and the SCJP I've been studying pretty much non-stop for the last four months.
I mostly used the HFSJ. There were a number of questions on the exam which were not fully covered in this book, but the vast majority were.
I also built a very small flash-card web-app to help me study. I figured I needed to make hundreds of flash-cards, and I type so much better than I print, so I made a web-app to create questions and answers, where I could quiz myself.
If anyone was interested, the app is:
http://68.110.19.51:8080/jprep/ It isn't exactly worthy of sharing yet, in fact it is far from it. Also, fair warning, some of the questions make only sense to me, and some of them are either inaccurate or flat-out wrong (haven't bothered to correct them, feel free to use the modify question option to do so yourself if you find one). Plus I don't have a static IP or a DNS, so that IP could change at any time.
I plan on expanding the app at some point, right now it only has one database table, and is really bear bones. I just needed it to study from, and to test out new things. I used a lot of what I learned in the book in the web-app, and I used to it to mess around and create filters and listeners and such.
The test actually had a couple of questions I didn't like at all, and one which I still maintain they got wrong (I'll have to try it out to see). The question only had two right answers, I'm sure of it, but they said to select three.
There was another question where the actual english was confusing. I'm not sure I'd be allowed to restate fully it here, but they mentioned that a request was from a certain server, and from a certain IP, "on" port X. It wasn't clear to me if the request was
from the specified port or
to the specified port, and the answer depended on this interpretation. In the end I just guessed.
Overall though, I'm pretty happy with my score.
Thank you to Bert, and to Kathy, and to the co-author (his name escapes me).