Review by John R. Donoghue for Sun Certified Web Component Developer Study Companion: SCWCD Java EE 5 (Exams 310-083 and 310-084)
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This is a complete, no nonsense guide to the material on the Sun Certified Web Component Developer (SCWCD) exam. It is well written, and easy to read.

Last week I passed the 310-084 exam with a score of 92%. This book was one of my chief resources in preparing. I bought this book on impulse (I already had the other three big books on preparation for the SCWCD). I was pleasantly surprised. The book covers all the material on the exam in a straightforward way. For example, I found the description of deploying web applications (deployment descriptor elements) very helpful.

Readers with no background in Servlets and JSP may find the material here too detailed for an introduction. These readers may be want to look at Head First Servlets and JSP: Passing the Sun Certified Web Component Developer Exam (Brain-Friendly Guides). Once they have the big picture from the “Head First” book, this would be a great second book, filling the details needed to pass the test.

Like most exam preparation books, there are questions at the end of each chapter (over 300 total). These questions make sure that help the reader make sure that they understand the material (these questions are somewhat easier than ones on the exam). Here, each answer has a complete explanation. I found it very useful to read ALL of the answers, not just the ones I missed. This helped me find things that I misunderstood, or once in a while pointed out when I got right answer for the wrong reason.

The book contains additional material (beyond the exam objectives) on methods and topics that are useful in real world web development. Also, the final section of the book contains a description of differences between J2EE 1.5 and Java EE 5. This added material is clearly labeled, so that candidates can skip it during final preparation.

Preparing for one of Sun’s certification exams will never be really easy or fun (they’re too hard for that), but if you have committed yourself to passing, this book is a great resource.

Highly recommended.

Review by TM Mbelli for Sun Certified Web Component Developer Study Companion: SCWCD Java EE 5 (Exams 310-083 and 310-084)
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This is an awksome book with lots of insight thoughts. Best to prepare for SCWCD 5 examSun Certified Web Component Developer Study Companion: SCWCD Java EE 5 (Exams 310-083 and 310-084)

Review by Philo Thea for Sun Certified Web Component Developer Study Companion: SCWCD Java EE 5 (Exams 310-083 and 310-084)
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It is a really good book for the preparation of SCWCD and would be a worthy companion in the preparation. It’s chapter’s go in depth and was very helpful.

Review by Qun Zhou for Sun Certified Web Component Developer Study Companion: SCWCD Java EE 5 (Exams 310-083 and 310-084)
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I passed SCWCD 5 with the score 89%. This book is definitely necessary for your certification studying. Although the content of this book is a little bit boring (very few images, full of text, not so easy to understand if you do not have so much fundamental knowledge on JSP and servlet), it is still the best book you must read if you want to pass the exam as soon as possible. I actually have another book to help prepare the test, but finally i recognized that I have to totally digest this book before I take the test.

Good luck to your exam.

Review by Abraham for Sun Certified Web Component Developer Study Companion: SCWCD Java EE 5 (Exams 310-083 and 310-084)
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If you are really looking for the SCWCD certification, this is the ONLY book you need. If you spend enough time on this one and understand the concepts the author has laid out, you are all set to get certified! Also, this is not just for the certification. I am sure, I will be using this book as a reference down the line!

Review by kalyson for Sun Certified Web Component Developer Study Guide (Exams 310-081 & 310-082) (Oracle Press)
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I got this book partially because I prefer more of a textbook format than the Head First books. This book’s format was more straightforward, so I got it along with the Head First Servlets and JSP. However, I have found a lot of errors, inconsistencies and confusing explanations in this book. Some of the errors are minor, but others really cause fundamental confusion. I’m searching for an errata for the book now. (There may not be one — I’m not finding it yet.)

Although the Head First books have a comic, cartoonish quality that I don’t generally care for, I must say that their editing is better, their explanations are always understandable, and I find myself going to that book to clear up my confusion with this one.

That being said, there is a lot of very good information in this book and some of the explanations and examples are pretty good. You might consider getting both books because they both cover the material in different ways.

I was tempted to give the book four stars, but I’ve just hit another few errors that are really irritating. (The author is trying to explain the difference between the forward() and include() functions for handling servlet requests. But his code examples mistakenly are showing forward() where apparently he meant to type include(). These examples do not match the explanation at all. See pages 183 and 184.)

Another egregious error: In the Head First Servlets & JSP book, they make a point of saying “You need to recognize WRONG method names like: getPrintWriter(), getResponseStream(), [...]” etc. And there’s a big X in a circle on top of these names. Look at the SCWCD book by D. Bridgewater on page 179. Guess what method he uses inside the code example — getPrintWriter() !!! (Gee, and I was wondering why my code would not compile.) In that SAME code sample, you can see him getting a PrintWriter object and calling the “write” method on it. I was perplexed by this because I saw them using the “println” method in the same situation in the Head First book. Well, apparently there is a difference, even though the code does work. Sierra and Bates in Head First make a point of saying you should use “println” with a PrintWriter and a “write” with a ServletOutputStream. They explain why, of course. I don’t know about you, but these sorts of errors are confusing. I’m not even mentioning the multitudes of small typos throughout the book, like: java.servlet.forward.path_info. (servlet is in the javax package, not java.)

In any case, the book might be worth getting, and if you are able to find an errata it would make the book much more usable. If you do not find an errata that covers all of these errors (I’ve only mentioned a few), then be sure to get some other resource to check this one against so you can understand parts that are erroneous or confusing.

Review by L. Cherepanov for Sun Certified Web Component Developer Study Guide (Exams 310-081 & 310-082) (Oracle Press)
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I would not recommend this book even though it covers all of exam objectives and has a lot of examples and exercises. The reason is that there are a lot of errors that make this book hard to read. It is very irritating, annoying and time consuming.

Here are just some of errors I found in the book.

1. Answer to question 13 on page 88: “…HttpServletRequest.getHeaders() returns all request header names…” It is not correct because the method that returns all request header names is getHeaderNames(). There is no getHeaders() method (with no arguments) in HttpServletRequest class.

2. Page 82 question 19. Author mistakenly took the code from question 8 so the question 19 and answer to it on page 90 are completely irrelevant.

3. On page 559 author says that the type for ‘items’ attribute is java.lang.Array. There is no such class in Java!

4. Page 637 answer to question 8: “…J to 14 (c:forEach, again)”. If you look at question’s code on page 625 you can see that correct answer should be: J maps to ‘body’.

Number of errors, big and small, is very high in this book. This is the case of unprofessional work both on the part of author & editor.

Review by Scott Moore for Sun Certified Web Component Developer Study Guide (Exams 310-081 & 310-082) (Oracle Press)
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After I finished the first chapter self-test, and saw that there were two obvious errors in the answer key (questions 7 and 19), I considered buying another book. I searched for an errata listing for the book online, with no success. I emailed the author and techical editor. To his credit, David Bridgewater replied promptly, but was not much help: he suggested that the publisher probably has it on their website (as of when I emailed him, they did not); and he also sent me corrections to two places in the book, but there are a lot more just two errors in the book.

The technical editor did not reply to my email. This comes as no surprise; perhaps she is embarrased at the poor job she did editing this book. She obviously did not give thorough consideration to the self-tests.

I decided that I did not want to spend the time or money to get a different exam guide, and that 99% of the book was most likely accurate, and the errata are probably easy to spot (even if they are really annoying), so I trudged on.

I regret that decision. I am now at the end of chapter 4, and have spotted a total of five major errors in the self-tests, and at least a dozen minor errors in the self-tests and the text of the chapters. Also annoying is the ambiguous wording in some of the self-test questions; some of the phrases used are open to interpretation, and should be worded to be less ambiguous.

Without knowing how good or bad other SCWCD exam guides are, I’d feel pretty confident in recommending that you should probably go with a different study guide that this one.

Review by George F. Morris for Sun Certified Web Component Developer Study Guide (Exams 310-081 & 310-082) (Oracle Press)
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The author probably has great insight into the subject matter;unfortunately, he does not know how to convey his knoeledge to the reader. The practice test questions are ambiguous and full of errors. There was probably minimal editing of questions and answers; as a result, a reader has to correct the errors and then try to fully comprehend the explanations to the practice questions. It is an inefficient way to study and learn. Head First,despite its errata (it has corrections at its website), is a superior product. This textbook is not worth the headaches.

Review by sanjos10 for Sun Certified Web Component Developer Study Guide (Exams 310-081 & 310-082) (Oracle Press)
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This book is a 5 star book if you are a beginner and have a lot of time at your disposal. The author is very detailed in his treatment of all the topics that comprise the SCWCD. However, if you are an experienced programmer and/or have a short amount of time to work with, then you will find yourself skipping through a lot of pages. I feel that the 750 odd pages could have been condensed to around 400. The 2 minute drills are very helpful. The exercises after each chapter do not help much and seem to be aiming to trick questions rather than model the questions from the exam.

All in all, very satisfied. I just passed the test last Saturday.