Perface

This book's primary objective is to help you prepare for and pass Sun Microsystem's SCJP certification for Java 5. The good news is that the exam does a good job of covering topics that most Java developers will encounter in their jobs. The challenging news is that the Java 5 exam is much broader in scope than its predecessor, the Java 1.4 exam. The new exam's objectives touch on many of the more commonly used of Java's APIs.The key word here is "touch." The exam's creators intended that passing the exam will demonstrate that the candidate understands the basics of APIs such as those for file I/O and regular expressions. This book follows closely both the breadth and the depth of the real exam. For instance, after reading this book, you probably won't emerge as a regex guru, but if you study the material, and do well on the self tests, you'll have a basic understanding of regex, and you'll do well on the exam. After completing this book, you should feel confident that you have thoroughly reviewed all of the objectives that Sun has established for the exam.

In This Book

This book is organized to optimize your learning of the topics covered by the SCJP Java 5 exam. Whenever possible, we've organized the chapters to parallel the Sun objectives, but sometimes we'll mix up objectives or partially repeat them in order to present topics in an order better suited to learning the material.

In addition to fully covering the SCJP Java 5 exam, we have also included on the CD eight chapters that cover important aspects of Sun's SCJD exam.