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A hefty tome designed to help you pass Sun's Java certification exams. Accordingly it is split into two main parts - the programmer's exam and the developer's exam. The result is a book not designed to teach you Java, but instead one that helps explain the 'quirks' and oddities. In fact all the things that make you a proficient Java programmer (or developer) and get asked for by Sun as part of their certification process.

The chapters are sensibly broken down, with summaries of what you will learn in each chapter. As well as this, you also get the detail of the information you will learn relating to the exam. There are a number of examples, requiring you to write various fragments of code to test the ideas. The examples are generally good, apart from some mistakes in the code. However most of these are fairly easy to spot - even for a fairly novice Java user. The chapters then conclude with what is not on the exam, but with areas that as a Java professional, one ought to know about. This is followed by a series of questions in the same style as onthe actual exam.

This is really the format of the book, that is, one you work your way through testing yourself at each stage. Having the answers (of which the majority are correct - sometimes the odd typo causes problems) is invaluable. If you are serious about passing your certification exams at the first attempt (not easy!) it is definitely worth getting this book. Just watch out for the 'odd' examples...