Complete Java?2 Certification Study Guide

This is a good book if you want to review and brush up on your knowledge for the SCJP 5.0 exam. With that being said, this is not the only material that you should use for the exam. The included CD has practice tests, but they are pretty weak. Many of the answers are incorrect and they are not even close to the difficulty of the actual exam. Do yourself a favor and buy the practice tests from Sun. Read the book, understand the topics, take the chapter tests on the CD and practice using Sun's practice tests. This is a painful exam and should not be taken lightly.

I highly recommend this book whether you're going for the certification or not. It's well laid out, and well written. I'd recommend it to anyone wanting general knowledge of all the Java concepts. Only complaint is that the directions for the password to access the PDF version of the manual was wrong.

I passed SCJP 5.0 by reading this book. However, some of the new material is covered in isolation. I'd like to see more examples, such as of interaction between method overloading/overriding and variable arguments, interaction between overloading/overriding and Generics, and examples of overloading/overriding combined with boxing/unboxing. Also, the password provided for the electronic version of the book on the CD is invalid (but see errata on Sybex web site for the solution to this problem).

This is a good enough book for the SCJP certification. For now this is the only certification book for SCJP 5.0. So, you don't have a choice. Other certification books have not yet been updated for SCJP 5.0 So, it gets four stars.