This book is an excellent resource for anyone preparing for Java Programmer certification. The book has detailed coverage of all exam objectives and includes a mock
test to give a good idea of how the actual exam would be like. There are a lot of useful examples, figures and reference tables in the book and there are indexes to find these which is very handy. The review questions in every chapter are tricky and help solidify the concepts.
Some of the highlights of the book IMO are:
The order of chapters is also ideal for people relatively new to Java. For example, the chapter on object comparisons and the chapter Lambdas introduces equality, sorting, filtering concepts before collections and streams chapters.The chapter on Generics has useful reference tables highlighting which operations are allowed when using Wildcards. There are many such useful tables throughout the book.Dedicated and detailed chapter on ArrayList. Helps with introduction to collections vs arrays. Important collection classes summarised in figures and tables for reference.Streams chapter has a lot of good figures to clearly explain how multiple operations on a stream are applied and how they affect each element in the stream.Useful guides at the end about how to register for the exam as well as mapping of exam objectives to chapters including Java 11 certification objectives.
Nothing is perfect and neither is this book. Quick Summary/Review Notes at the end of each chapter would've helped as reference once someone goes through the book. Also due to the margin and paper size some of the examples span 2-3 pages. I wish there was a bigger paper size used (although it would've been a non-standard book size then), then it would be easier to fit more content on every page and the thickness of the book would be less.
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Disclosure: I received a free copy of the book from the publishers to review on behalf of coderanch.