Comments on SCWCD Exam Study Kit Second Edition Java Web Component Developer Certification Hanumant Deshmukh, Jignesh Malavia

On the bright side the text is well written, with few spelling errors. The text goes far beyond the scope of purely helping the reader to prepare for the exam. The exam questions are advanced and most are difficult to understand. Although Javascipt is clearly not a prerequisite for the exam, there are some tricky examples i.e. in forms, which could be used as a reference.
On the dark side, the text is sometimes not easy to understand. This is definitely no book for beginners, such as the one offered by the Head First series. The catalog of the errata page is quite long too, especially for the first prints.
All in all, the book which was published in 2005, is surely not a primer. It could also be used as a reference later in your career, but you might initially need a lower level text to read, before actually attempting to sit for the exam.

Comments on Heads first Servlets&Jsp 2nd Edition

On the bright side, the book is written in an unusual way, full of graphics and photos of an oriental martial arts movie, in an attempt to make reading the text, seem like fun. The book is full of exercises and questions to help the reader to memorize whatever is important for passing the exams. The text is clear, easy to understand most of the times, with the exceptions of the chapter about patterns and custom tag development. There also many typographical errors in the text and the questions as well. One should consult the huge error page at O'Reilly.
On the dark side, there is no hands on coding practice, the examples mentioned are deliberately simple, about cats and dogs, or outdated (struts) so that you can not easily reuse any source code from the book. This is no reference book either, as stated by its authors.
All in all, the book prepares you well for the Sun J2EE 1.4 exams, servlet v2.4, jsp v2.0, in a straightforward and funny way, but it certainly needed a greater update on older themes and addition of newer, such as jsf.