I studied for the certification for about 2 months. I'm not an experienced programmer and I only learned java in about 7 months and programming in 3 months (I'm first year college).
My strategy is:
1. I focus on the structure: I look at the class heading level (is there a double public class, is it extending a final class...etc)
I look at the method heading level- what are the methods for every class-- is there overloading and overriding-- if so, I will see if they follow the rules
---methods can't be overriden to be more strict or more erroneous was my keyphrase
I do variable tracing in each method -- to see if there was no out of scope variable or no final variable being incremented, etc.
Finally, I visualize the entire question and ask the final question: What knowledge is being tested here? Is that knowledge worht testing or not... if not, there might be another catch
somewhere
2. I memorized all the included api and organized the common usages of the included api. For example IO usually has write and read first that looks like a very common 8 line
structure.
3. Finally, K and B was not first book, I had Sanghera's book (I read it for 2 days) and K and B (for 3 days)... I had Dietel as my first book in java (3 months). K and B is better speed read -- because of the presentation redundancy of the concepts, you won't miss a single important concept. Try reading 400-500 words per minute in K and B. I find myself scoring higher on the chapter end by focusing on the section headings rather than the individual words. During my first time through the exercises, I scored around 80% (with 100% in Inner Classes and 95% in Development) largely because I remember the specific headings of concepts in my mind.
4.You can download Whizlabs at ... Whizlabs.com (a huge surprise). It's expensive but you only need the diagnostic exam and trial exam which is free
Last words: The key to understanding K and B is to notice how each topic is organized, so that you spend more time reflecting on the general concepts than the specific examples. That's another way of saying, you should memorize the chapter and section headings rather than specific exam watches or summaries because the headings are "linked" (has reference to) (pointing to ) to the specific exam watches but not the other way around.
I hope this helps---oh Java 6 is more focused on Collections and specific exceptions and less on garbage collection as well as the NumberFormat and DateFormat. the threading queitons are more difficult than in K and B (the only thing more difficult)