I took the -055
test last week. Most of my studying consisted of a book targeted at the 1.4 exam and the practice questions in the game on this site. That was not enough and I ended up failing the test.
I never took the 1.4 exam, so I don't have much of a way to compare it. The 055 exam includes "Task" questions. In the task questions you have to drag and drop code into place, kind of like a fill in the blanks thing, but with multiple blanks.
The bad thing about these task questions is that if you mark them to go back and look at them again it will prompt you saying that if you open the task question it will be cleared and you have to start over. My advice on these is to skip them entirely until the end, because doing the task and marking them is a waste of time if you plan on looking at it again.
I was worried about being able to remember things like bit shifting and how to translate hex and such, because I never use that sort of thing in my daily programming. None of that was on the test.
I had never seen auto boxing and unboxing, that's either new or I completely glossed over it.
There were questions about localization of dates.
There were questions about generic collections with a notation something like ArrayList<myObject> and notation involving question marks like Collection<? extends E>.
There was a question involving the differences between StringBuilder and StringBuffer.
I have now picked up the "Complete
Java 2 Certification 5th edition" by Phil Heller and Simon Roberts, a Sybex book. Hopefully this will get me through the test correctly next time.
Good luck.