RE: Who reads them anyways....
Laurent Michalkovic has an interesting post on the fact that no one reads the specs. I read them two years ago, that's right - in December of 2001. I read all of the ones that that interested me at the time: JSP 1.2, Servlet 2.4, J2EE 1.3 and EJB 2.0. I downloaded them all and printed them out and read them. It was boring and cost me around $150 just in printer cartridges. They had good information, they're just dry. Luckily, I was very motivated to read them. I was studying for the Web Component Developer exam from Sun, so the JSP 1.2 and Servlet 2.4 specs were essential reading. I read J2EE 1.3 and EJB 2.0 shortly thereafter while studying to become a BEA Certified Developer. Interesting thing about the BEA exam, I ended up concentrating on WebLogic-specific stuff to pass the exam. Not much on standards, mostly questions on server configuration, clustering, etc.
I've skimmed through the latest ones, but I haven't read them page-by-page cover-to-cover. Besides, the mere size of each will scare you off:
- Servlet 2.4: 309 pages
- JSP 2.0: 458 pages
- J2EE 1.4: 242 pages
- JSTL 1.0: 219 pages
- JSF 1.0 EA: 117 pages
That's a heckuva lot of reading. When studying for these certifications, I also picked up Professional Java Server Programming J2EE, 1.3 Edition by Wrox. I actually thought this was a great book and I learned a lot more from it than I did from reading the specs.
Interestingly enough (or maybe not at all), I also bought (and read) J2EE Applications and BEA WebLogic Server. However, the BEA Documentation site turned out to be a better resource than that book!