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SCJD exam with J2SE 5 (2nd ed.)
Camerlengo T., Monkhouse A., Apress, Berkeley, CA, 2005. 360 pp. Type: Book (9781590595169)
Date Reviewed: Oct 9 2006

This introductory book covers Java developer certification. It is intended to help people get their Sun-certified Java developer (SCJD) certification. The book does a good job of providing exam-oriented information. Although it does not cover every Java topic in detail, it does offer insight into what a typical SCJD assignment is.

The authors pick a very small project to discuss. The project is a DVD store, and touches on different areas of programming. Just like any other software project, the preliminary phase is analysis and design. The authors have attempted to cover the basics of this topic in chapter 2. The first few sections cover very little on requirements gathering and analysis; later sections discuss coding style and common practices. It seems that chapter 2 provides more style-guide suggestions than software analysis and design. Chapter 3 discusses Sun’s requirements for this certification project quite well. These are basically tips to keep in mind while writing code for an SCJD assignment.

After analysis and design, the next step for the DVD store project is to design the graphical user interface (GUI). Chapter 8 discusses this topic in moderate depth. It basically describes one of the most common patterns for a GUI, model-view-controller (MVC), followed by Swing’s application programming interface (API). In the chapter’s last section, these concepts are utilized in the DVD store project. Chapter 8 could have followed chapter 3 to maintain the project development life cycle flow. However, the authors have chosen to discuss threading in chapter 4. The topic is quite broad and a single chapter is not enough for it. The authors cover the theoretical side of threads, which seems unnecessary for an assignment-oriented book. Threading plays a role in GUIs as well. Implementing threads in GUIs could be different than implementing them in background processes. The book has little information on multithreaded GUIs.

Chapter 5 addresses the real design issues involved in class designs. It introduces the facade pattern for class implementations. Again, this is a huge topic, which is probably covered better in other books, but the authors provide enough information to understand one of the very common approaches to class creation.

Chapter 6 discusses networking with remote method invocation (RMI) in Java. As the authors say, it is crucial to select either socket or RMI for the assignment. The book briefly discusses this issue. It would have been useful to include a discussion of RMI with some real-world scenarios. The authors take a very theoretical approach to RMI. Using these concepts in a given assignment would demand special skills. The DVD store assignment has a client-side socket class and basically does information retrieval from a remote socket port. The authors have provided a small but very useful code snippet to understand these very basic socket functions. Embedding RMI or socket functions in the assignment would be a very subjective decision. If required, it is likely to be inside GUI components. The book provides very little information on linking the GUI to these backbone frameworks.

The authors have said that testing is not so important on the certification exam. However, having the right test cases for an assignment will help in getting the code right. Test cases are usually written using the JUnit framework, and can be developed straightforwardly. Unfortunately, the authors have not touched on this area significantly.

On the positive side, the authors have done a fine job explaining the project and the approach one should take to solve an SCJD assignment. Programming conventions like variable and method names sound trivial, but are important for getting good marks. The authors have emphasized this. Packaging software and generating documentation is covered as well. In summary, this is a good certification-oriented book with a mix of related topics.

Reviewer:  Dilip Agheda Review #: CR133410 (0710-0964)
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