Howdy all!
Well, it's terrible how late we were and how long y'all have had to wait. I know Bert mentioned this, but I'll reiterate: the book ended up 200 pages larger than we had planned... we just didn't want to skimp on any of the things covered in the exam, and even though we were the *developers* of the exam, we still did a bad job of predicting what it would take to do what we felt was a thorough enough treatment for all the topics. If the book had JUST been a Servlets/JSP book (instead of a certification book), it would have been a lot smaller
The 1.4 exam is completely different from the 1.3 exam, even though a lot of the objectives are similar. With the current
SCJP, for example, we *updated* the exam by adding and changing questions, but we left a lot of questions and objectives the same. With this SCWCD, we rewrote 100% of the exam, so there are no questions from the previous exam made it into the new one.
There aren't any huge areas that are no longer on the exam, although you will have fewer questions on what is now the Classic Tag model than appeared on the 1.3 exam, because we've now added questions on the new tag models for Tag Files and Simple Tags.
The exam is definitely more difficult than the previous exam--on purpose. The 1.3 SCWCD was the only exam that had been criticized for being too easy and too knowledge-based (as opposed to *performance-based*). So, the goal was to make the questions more challenging in the *right* ways--by making them more closely related to real-world issues, as opposed to simply memorizing the API. That's not to say there isn't a fair amount you have to memorize, though.
OK, so the dates. Every time prior to today that we (and O'Reilly and Amazon) have given estimates, we were *guessing* based on when we though the book would be done. All of the guessing is now OVER, because the book has now been *printed*. That means the book is already in the warehouse and beginning to move through the system. Until 10 days ago, there was still no way to say with *certainty* that the actual books are done. But now they are!
The only question now is *exactly* when the books will be sent, but with our previous three books, by the time it got to this stage it never took more than one week for the book to ship on Amazon US. I can't speak for international shipments, though. We have been told that Amazon will have the book at the same time O'Reilly has it, so there is probably no advantage to pre-ordering from O'Reilly.
Keep in mind that once Amazon starts officially *shipping* it, you will almost certainly see the following:
1) It will suddenly say "Ships in 24 hours", and that tells you they finally are filling back-orders.
2) They will immediately (within a day or two) sell out of their initial order, and you will see "Ships in 3-5 days" or even worse, "Ships in 2-3 weeks" on Amazon. DON'T BELIEVE IT! The way Amazon works it with O'Reilly, they will refill their warehouse within 1-2 days and suddenly it will go back to "Ships in 24 hours" again. So ANYTIME you see "ships in 2-3 weeks", do not believe it. Wait a day and it will go back to 24 hours. This is just how their system works. There is a *tiny* chance that they will sell-out completely, but O'Reilly has ordered an extra big printing to make sure this doesn't happen. Because it usually takes 2 weeks to print, bind, and ship the books again (and this is the stage that has just been completed).
Isn't this more than you ever wanted to know about book distribution?
Oh yes, as far as US physical bookstores,
you should see them on shelves within the next 7-10 days, depending on the store. There is a promotion for the book at Borders (or Barnes and Noble, I forget) for September, so believe me--there is NO chance that the book won't be in stores in September.
So, once again my apologies--but for the same money you'll get an extra 200 pages... although after this printing they may raise the price to accommodate the extra size. That won't happen for at least several months, though.
In the meantime, I will try to spend some time here and help answer questions. I can't tell you again how sorry we are and how appreciative we are of your patience. It's not O'Reilly's fault (or Amazon's) fault--this was Bert's fault
No, it was both our faults. We did a poor job of estimating the amount of effort and time. Believe me, this is our sole form of income, so if we thought we could have rushed it out earlier and still delivered a book that would really help you prepare well, we would have!
cheers,
Kathy
