Head First EJB or J2EE Spec

[Karen Gomes]

Hi Kathi and Bert,
First of all for the realease of this, much awaited book. We'll look forward to having our copies asap.
Does the book cover the entire spec ?
If yes then, can we read only the book instead of the spec now for SCBCD ?
Thanks
Karen

[Bert Bates]

Hi Karen,
HF EJB is an intro book, and a certification book. I think if you never actually write any EJBs and if you never study the spec, and if HF EJB is the only book you have, you could probably still pass the exam, but it's a good spec, pretty readable, and HF EJB is NOT a reference book! So I'd say EJB is a big topic and there is no one book that can totally cover all the EJB bases.

[Sainudheen Mydeen]

Hi Bert
I could see HF EJB's front cover mentioning "PASSING the SCBCD exam". Why this particular word "PASSING"? Why can't it be SCBCD study kit in place?
-Sainudheen

[Kathy Sierra]

Howdy,
I'm going to disagree with my co-author a little
I am quite confident that the book is all you need to pass the exam.
You definitely do NOT need to have the spec or any other book. However, I DO think that it is a very good idea to get the spec, and use it to refer to, especially as you go through the mock exam answer explanations (that give the page numbers for the spec where that topic is covered.)
This does not, of course, guarantee that you'll get a high score, or even pass... some people just do not do well at test-taking, even though they understand the material. But the EJB exam is not nearly as *tricky* as the SCJP... if you know the material, the questions should appear fairly clear and straightforward to you, as long as you read very carefully. Some people still get tripped up by things like:

Which are true? (choose all that apply)
A) A session bean class must extend javax.ejb.SessionBean
B) The local home create() method for a stateless session bean always returns a type that extends javax.ejb.EJBObject
Of course, A is wrong because it says "extend" instead of "implement" and B is wrong because a local home interface create must return something that extends javax.ejb.EJBLocalObject.
So those little subtle differences are crucial. You have to pay close attention. And these are two of the easier questions...
And before you panic, yes, the REAL exam tells you how many answers to choose. It does NOT say "choose all that apply". We use "choose all that apply" to make sure that our questions are just slightly more difficult to answer, because people tend to *memorize* questions on a mock exam, and end up with better scores than they'll get with new questions they've never seen.
cheers,
Kathy

[Andrew Monkhouse]

Hi everyone,

Originally posted by Kathy Sierra:
I'm going to disagree with my co-author a little

There's trouble a brewin'

Originally posted by Kathy Sierra:
And before you panic, yes, the REAL exam tells you how many answers to choose. It does NOT say "choose all that apply". We use "choose all that apply" to make sure that our questions are just slightly more difficult to answer, because people tend to *memorize* questions on a mock exam, and end up with better scores than they'll get with new questions they've never seen.

Having done the real exam and having been a beta tester for the questions in K&B book, I can add that I got a lower score in the K&B mock questions than in the real exam, but if the K&B questions had mentioned the number of right answers then the two scores would have been almost identical.
Regards, Andrew

[Bert Bates]

No trouble...

There's trouble a brewin'

My writing style is simply more 'compact' than my co-author's...
[ October 28, 2003: Message edited by: Bert Bates ]