Thanks so much for picking up my books! I appreciate every little vote of confidence.
You're reading of the complete reference kinda scares me. I mean, that's great and all, and probably will work towards you being a knowledgeable programmer, but there's
alot of information in there that doesn't directly apply to the
SCJA exam. The SCJA exam is only about 20-25% syntax. The rest is OO, client technologies, server technologies, etc.
I might make this comparison - if you were taking a drivers
test, you wouldn't study a reference book on the internals of the combustion engine. I mean, it's good stuff to know, but might not be directly attributable.
What might really be good? Just program, and write a program or two. Maybe even download
tomcat and see if you can write and deploy a
JSP, or a
Servlet even. See how those technologies work.
Did you see my free, online mock exams at my website? How would you design that program? What object model would you use? How many classes? Could you draw the object model using UML class diagrams? Could you create the classes? Try it! Actually trying to solve a problem like that would probably help you learn alot faster than reading the reference book.
Best of luck in your studies. It's a tough exam, but I've found the people using my books, and doing a little bit of Java programming on their own, have incredible success on the Sun Certified Java Associate exam.
Best of luck!
-Cameron
