SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 Study Guide

Chapter 1: Declarations and Access Control
 
Chapter 2: Object Orientation
 
Chapter 3: Assignments
 
Chapter 4: Operators
 
Chapter 5: Flow Control, Exceptions, and Assertions
 
Chapter 6: Strings, I/O, Formatting, and Parsing
 
Chapter 7: Generics and Collections
 
Chapter 8: Inner Classes
 
Chapter 9: Threads
 
Chapter 10: Development
 
Chapter 11: Introduction to the SCJD
 
Chapter 12: Coding Standards
 
Chapter 13: Clarity and Maintainability
 
Chapter 14: Designing the Graphical User Interface
 
Chapter 15: Networking Issues
 
Chapter 16: Database Issues
 
Chapter 17: Exam Documentation
 
Chapter 18: Final Submission and Essay

We assume that because you're planning on becoming certified, you already know the basics of Java.
If you're completely new to the language, this chapter—and the rest of the book—will be confusing; so be sure you know at least the basics of the language before diving into this book.
That said, we're starting with a brief, high-level refresher to put you back in the Java mood, in case you've been away for awhile.

Being a	1.5 SCJP means you must	be at one with the object-oriented aspects of Java.
You must dream	of inheritance	hierarchies, the power of polymorphism must flow through Byou, cohesion and loose coupling must become second nature to	you, and composition must be your bread	and butter.
This chapter will prepare you for all of the object-oriented objectives and questions you'll	encounter on the exam.
We have heard of many experienced Java programmers who haven't really become fluent with the object-oriented tools that Java provides,  so we'll start at the beginning.

For most people, understanding the basics of the stack and the heap makes it far easier to understand topics like argument passing, polymorphism, threads, exceptions, and garbage collection.
In this section, we'll stick to an overview, but we'll expand these topics several more times throughout the book.
For the most part, the various pieces (methods, variables, and objects) of Java programs live in one of two places in memory: the stack or the heap. For now, we're going to worry about only three types of things: instance variables, local variables, and objects:

If you've got variables, you're going to modify them. You'll increment them, add them together,  and compare one to another (in about a dozen different ways). In this chapter, you'll learn Ihow to do all that in Java.
For an added bonus, you'll learn how to do things that you'll probably never use in the real world, but that will almost certainly be on the exam.