Hi Pradeep!
Thanks for all of your help with tech. editing!
1). Generally speaking, Kathy and I both believe that it's best to 'choose one master' when writing a book. In other words, we like to have a specific focus for our books as opposed to writing "The one and only
Java book you'll ever need, for anything from EJB's to
Servlets to cell phones". In this case we bent the rules a little bit. Since we were part of the team that created the Sun exam, we did our best to make sure that the exam reflects real world usefullness. So we thought that an intro to EJB and a certification book would overlap a lot... so our goal was that this book be BOTH an intro and a certification guide.
2). We're working to create a general purpose exam simulator that we can use for all of our books, when that is complete it will be available on our website. We will be adding HF EJB content to the website, and we'll post on this forum as new content becomes available.
3). Writing the book was fun (well for me at least, Kathy is the bean queen, she did most of the heavy lifting
). Head First books are very unusual, and we haven't got all the ins and outs down to a science yet. For example, O'reilly was very patient with us because as we got further into the book it kept getting bigger. One of the main reasons we were a few weeks late was because the book ended up being about 120 pages bigger than we thought a few months ago!
4). We'll put a TOC up on our website... hmmm... *maybe* we'll post a TOC here!?, we'll let you know
5). Sun decided (and we agree), that it will be a long time before 1.4 is commonly used. The feeling is that 1.3 will be the 'real world' version for a long time.