This is an interesting
thread! It's maybe an opportunity to summarize a few ideas and issues that come up periodically. I won't speak for Kathy here, but my guess is that she would mostly say the same things I'm saying.
First off, both Kathy and I have a lot of professional software development in our backgrounds. You are however correct that we don't have 4 years of professional experience using EJBs and 4 years using Servlets and 4 years using J2ME and 4 years using J2SE
Speaking for myself, I have no illusions that someone who's been focused on any one of these technologies wouldn't 'eat my lunch' if we had a 'smackdown' on that technology
I think that there might be some misconceptions about the Sun certification world, so I thought I'd try to clear a few things up.
First off, Kathy and I have been fortunate to be a part of many of the recent Java certification teams. But we are only a part of those teams. In every case, the teams consist of at least nine experts; a combination of Sun's internal engineers, and experts working in the industry. So, we have some input into the creation of the testing objectives, but the objectives are created by the entire team.
Second, it seems to me that a lot of people in the software industry have the wrong perspective about these certifications. In the case of the SCJP, the SCWCD, the SCMAD, the SCBCD, and the SCDJWS certifications, our stated goal is to create an exam that represents the experience of six to 12 months using the technology in question. A lot of people think that if, for instance, you have your SCWCD, you are a total Servlets and JSP guru, who can leap tall buildings in a single bound. Instead, the certification really means that the candidate has a solid foundation in the technology. When we create the objectives, we always have the notion of a 'solid foundation' in mind.
Third, I'd like to address the ideas of 'conflict of interest' and 'rolling up some chapters'. There are typically well over 2000 Java titles available on Amazon. When we started to write Java books, we decided that one of our tenets would be to focus the intention of each of our books. So far, we have focused all of our books on the learning side rather than on the reference side. We don't think we can do both at the same time. Our books tend to be big, heavy, tomes. Servlets is close to 900 pages, EJB is 700 pages, and the new SCJP book will be over 850 pages (plus another couple hundred pages of additional content on the CD). They're big because our goal is to teach the technologies, not just provide exam crams. I have to chuckle when I hear someone say 'all you have to do is read HF XXX, and you'll pass the exam!' Really? You don't have to study, or write code? Is everyone capable of memorizing 850 pages without learning the technology? We get lots and lots of feedback (which is great!), (not all of it positive BTW), and what we hear most of the time is that our readers really do learn stuff. phew! That's our goal! I won't claim that it's not great to be a part of the exam creation team, because it is great, but anyone can write a certification book. If you want to make sure you have a good handle on the contents of the exam, just take it a few times.
So to summarize:
- The exams are geared towards demonstrating a solid foundation, not guru status.
- Industry experts create the objectives.
- Kathy and I focus on teaching this foundational material.
Hope that helps, and we welcome your feedback and ideas!
Bert