Thanks for all the advice from JavaRanch users, it was very helpful. A lot of people seem to want to know what people do to pass, so I will attempt to tell all.
My background: I had about 7 weeks of
Java training, and then 6 months later I had 6 weeks of experience, so about 3 months total.
Books: I used RHE and 1 week before I bought Exam Cram and found it helpful because it was condensed. Sometimes you have to wade through 20 pages in RHE to find what you want vs. 5 or 10 pages in Exam Cram.
Exams: I took all the exams in RHE, the first Marcus Exam, the applied reasoning
applet which was a lot harder than the exam, and I bought JQ+ a couple days before I took the exam. I took 4 JQ+ exams. I liked the customization aspect of it a lot. I also found that a lot of JQ+ questions were almost the same as exam questions. The exam has changed sine RHE came out, so their exams were not as helpful. The Marcus
test seemed to be about the same level of difficulty as the real thing. I would say that JQ+ gave me the best preparation, I had seen over half the exam questions in JQ+, but was harder than the real exam. Mainly because you did not have to go into such a level of detail on the real exam. For example, I didn't get any constructor questions about AWT components or which Collections members have a comparator method.
My advice is to focus on the following: the basic IO classes and constructors; layout managers and their default and resizing behavior and what the default layout manager for frame, applet, panel, etc. are; Overloading and overriding; threads; and when binding occurs, i.e. SuperClass Super = new SubClass() - which methods/variables are used by Super.variable and Super.method().
Sorry for the long post but I hope this helps those of you out there who are trying to pass.
This is my best guess for the breakdown of questions by segment:
Declarations and Access Control8
Flow Control and Exception Handling7
Garbage Collection2
Language Fundamentals8
Operators and Assignments7
Overloading/riding, Rutime Type, and Object Orientations 7
Threads7
awt package4
lang package2
util package2
io package5