[manishsharan]

I am going to attempt answering your question from the Job perspective.

If you are going to be working in Financial Industry in Capital markets -- pay close attention to Java concurrency.

If you looking to work in large companies with Enterprise applications, pay attention to ESB technolgies usch as Mule or Camel ( you need to be very adept all java based XML technologies e.g JAXB, XSLT, XPath etc.) TIBCO would be super helpful in getting those jobs.

The of course there is JSF. This POS has been sold to all enterprises as the frickin' holy grail of web application development by likes of IBM, Oracle. Knowing JSF would increase your likelihood of full time permanent employment. The downside is the PHB that will come with this job. On a related note, you can go ahead and forget swing -- very companies use it nowadays.

And at every Java interview , every techie will ask you about a. Singletons, b. JDBC Transactions c. Spring d. Hiberbnate.

Hope this helps.

[JQuinn]

Thank you so much. Yes this does help significantly. I am hoping to go into the Enterprise Applications (though of course I am not going to limit myself) so I thank you for pointing those out to me. I'm not sure I know what JSF is but I will definitely look into it. Thank you for being able to separate the technologies into Jobs. This will help significantly. And the pointers for the Java interviews is immensely helpful. Thank you.