Rating:  - Poorly Organized
This is one of those books that looks good on the store shelf. It appears to cover all of the certification objectives. It has a CD that promises mock exams. Unfortunately the book is very poorly written. It doesn't seem as though the authors really understand what they are talking about, and instead are cobbling together material from other sources: Starting with the introductory material, the descriptions of the concepts of architecture and design are terrible muddled. Also, I have never read such poor descriptions of the GoF design patterns. The EJB material is scattered and poorly organized. Finally a bunch of mostly useless Java code is thrown in, presumably to make the book seem more authoritative. Througout, this book seems to repeat the same material over and over again. The back of the book promises an "exam watch - warnings based on thorough post-exam research identifying the most troublesome exam topics." This sounds useful, but appears nowhere in the book as far as I can tell.
I would suggest simply buying the Sun press study guide by Mark Cade and Simon Roberts. It is not "complete" but the material is very well written, and you can go on the Web to find other people's study notes and mock exams to complement your review of the material.
Rating:  - Very Weak on Part II
I've already passed the SCEA part I and was working on part II when this came out. I got it hoping to get some good insight but was very disappointed. I assume the part I coverage is better from briefly looking it over, but wasn't wowed by that either.
Rating:  - What a shame
I bought this book after reading other osborne's certification books. I thought the quality would be similar, but it's a shame I was totally wrong.
...After seeing some people rating this book with 5 stars I think they haven't been fair. If you pass the exam it doesn't mean the book is good, maybe you already had some experience on the subject.
I DON'T think this book is worth the money it costs. At most I would buy it sharing costs with some friends so that we all can read the pdf version.
Finally, and just to make it clear, the CD does NOT contain 2 sample exams. It only contains one exam and after registering at osborne you'll be given a chance for a second one. Slight difference. Both exams have some ambiguous questions and wrong ones...
Rating: - The book is a poor assembly of Sun tutorials
This is a poorly edited and incoherently put together from SUN's J2EE tutorials. What a shame.
Rating:  - Primary material for Architect exam part1 preparation
I have actually taken the exam before buying this book. But I had a chance to take a look in the book stores. I know how it was terrible in collecting the resources. This book saves a lot of time.Most of the topics are well covered from ground up to detail so that even the beginners can learn the basic concepts if they are not so strong. There are also examples codes everywhere in the book. This would be really help if you have not been extensively in the J2ee development.I would say that this book covers 90% of the topic asked in the exam. But for topics like DNS round robin you have to get materials from the forum.Definitely we can't expect everything from the author as certain topics are really in general(common architectures), so that SUN can ask anything. So I would appreciate the author for taking so much effort.
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