Thursday, August 17, 2006

I understood!

An entire song in Japanese. I was listening to the Kiroro CD I've had for probably 7 years now, and just realized that for the first time I could understand the lyrics! No straining either; I literally knew all the vocabulary. Exciting!

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

SCJP Exam for J2SE 5 prelim review

I'm studying for the Sun Java exam for Java 5.0, and using the book SCJP Exam for J2se 5 by Paul Sanghera. So far the writing is quite clear, but quite a few typos are showing up that are bothering me.

I think they could have put a little more effort into proofreading the book, considering it's not an inexpensive book.

So far:
* Some errors in the value ranges for primitive classes - the text is correct but the diagram is wrong.

* A few errors in the solutions for the chapter review questions

* Discrepancy between the text and the figure for the discusson on non-static nested classes (aka inner classes) and static nested classes. The discussion was a bit confusing so I looked up more detailed information (more here). I'll need to run the example figures and see if the code as specified in the book actually works.

I'm only halfway through chapter 3, so I'm wondering how good this book will be. On the plus side, it's a positive aspect that I'm able to actually catch these errors; it's a good way to get a more thorough understanding of Java 5.0.