For free production-ready & J2EE certified servers, you could either try
JBoss or Jonas. My suggestion is not to use any IDEs yet for helping you to create the interfaces & bean class. Some IDEs automate too much until you'd miss out on a lot of required knowledge for the exams. But if you're interested, try the JBoss-IDE, its a plugin for use with Eclipse. Both being free.
Anyway, there's a link at the top for SCBCD materials, do check it out. And reading the specifications, does help.
