Originally posted by Vedhas Pitkar:
The Kathy Siera book... covers the programmers part while Max's book caters ONLY to the developer part.So should I expect more from Max' book?
Thanks again,Vedhas.
YES! With respect to the SCJD exam,
you should definitely expect more from Max's book. I'm going to put this as strongly as I can... if you have passed SCJP and are looking for a Developer exam book, Max's book is the only one that will really teach/show/explain how to design and create your Developer exam project. It is the one *I* would buy under those circumstances. Our book doesn't do that, although it does offer -- as others have said -- some unique and perhaps useful insight into the assessment (I work with the certification team at Sun, so this is an area I know.)
Max is being quite generous when he says that you should choose which book suits your style, etc. That would be true if both books covered the same ground, but they do NOT. It isn't a question of style (and I happen to think both of our books share the goal of being friendly and easy-to-understand
If you want help learning how to put your project together, you really do need Max's book and it will help you far more than ours will.
Bert and I just don't believe that someone who has already passed SCJP should have to pay for our whole book just to get the SCJD portion (since nearly 3/4 of the book is devoted to SCJP). And that's why we are going to work with Mark to find ways to get as many pieces of our SCJD available online as we can. Give us a week or two (we're still in last stages of finishing up a new O'Reilly book, so we're still crazed) and we'll get something going for you.
Bert and I bought Max's book sometime ago and really liked it a lot. I'm rather hard to impress in the "is-it-friendly?" department, and I have a huge aversion to dry, academic text books. But as you can tell from Max's posts, he has a nice, clear, understandable style.
So PLEASE -- as much as we so appreciate the nice feedback and praise for some of our SCJD parts, and as much as we do agree that our assessment information can be quite valuable, I really urge you to:
* If you can buy only one SCJD book, I'd go with Max
* If you're still studying for SCJP, get ours!
* If you have unlimited funds, buy both. In fact, if you have unlimited funds, buy a whole BUNCH of our books and donate them to javaranch
And then, be patient and we'll see how much of our assessment info we can make available to you online.
If you REALLY want to help us out, buy Max's book and then go write a nice Amazon review of *our* book

for the SCJP people.
Cheers,
Kathy