"MY STORY" You should, IMO, buy two or three good books on Java... The
"problem" is
choosing which ones
There are so many, most of them (I bet),
bad. Then you have to consider your background as in level of programming experience, does it include OOP (like C++) or not (like me).
Eight months ago almost to the day, I posted my first question about Java to the USENET newsgroup comp.lang.java.programmer. Before that I did not know OOP. Only C and assembly (and FORTRAN from a previous life!)
After becoming 100% bored in my last position as a C (and "off-line") programmer, I decided to change things.
I decided to learn the language and did not think about certification until later, as an afterthought when I figured it would be somewhat unreasonable to expect a decent job programming in Java with just my
word backing up the claim. (Well I have some programs on the Web which I'll use as an example of what I have done, but still...)
As such, I covered
much more material from what's included in the exam. I learned
applets, networking, more AWT that's covered in the
test, reflection...
I used the
Core Java books, the (Sun)
Java Tutorial 2nd ed. and
Java Tutorial Continued (both paper), Bruce Eckel's
Thinking in Java, Ivor Horton's
Beginning Java,
Just Java 2 (Linden),
Java I/O (Harold),
Java Threads (Oaks and Wong),
Exploring Java (Niemeyer and Peck),
The Java Programming Language (Arnold and Gosling)
I have many more but I haven't gotten to them yet: The new editions of
Graphic Java 2 (two vols, AWT and Swing), the
Java Swing book published by O'Reilly.
Last but not least,
The Java Class Libraries, 2nd ed (3 volumes, 10 lbs?) are an invaluable
reference!
