Hi guys,
I passed my SCJP exam today with 93%. I just thought that I would share with you my experience, and what I found useful in preperation.
I have a relatively short programming background. I have only done any serious work with Fortran - a molecular simulation program for my Masters.
I took 3 weeks preperation time. I spent 4-5 hours a night, every night after work, and all day on weekends.
I started by working throught the RHE book in full, making many notes. For me, making detailed notes on every topic certainly helped me to understand.
Next, I worked through Bill Brogden's Exam Cram book. I definitely needed to go through the RHE book first though, because Bill's book is very brief - yet covers everything you need to know in perfect depth. Again, I made many notes, this really did help, just drilling everything into the brain!
I then worked through as many practice exams as I could. The new version of RHE has a good set of exams, although I don't believe them to be quite as hard as the real thing. The exam at the end of Bill's book, however, I would say was easily as hard as the real thing.
Other exams that I believe are particularly close to the standard of the real thing are:
Marcus green's Exams 1 and 2.
Bill brogden's exams - particularly Bills 'Hardest questions'.
Barry Boone's exams.
All of these exams can be found at Maha Anna's page here at JavaRanch:
http://www.javaranch.com/maha/_Mock_Exams/_mock_exams.html This is an incredible resource - you should attempt a good selection of the practice exams he links to.
Also, try the Rules Roundup here at JavaRanch. It is excellent for getting your basics up to scratch.
Now on to my actual exam.... what was it like? Well....
* 4-5 questions on IO to start with. These just required you to know the constructors and how you could chain the Streams/Readers together.
* 4-5 questions on Threads. Some of these were really tricky - harder than any practice questions I had had. Although I could eliminate the incorrect answers rather that identify the correct ones.
* Loads of questions on Language Fundamentals. These were hard to identify as 'Language Fundamentals', they were questions about all sorts of things, but where the answer depended on you being able to spot and invalid overridden method access modifier, or a lack of required constructor or something similar. There were many questions where there was just a 'code does not compile' answer. These required particularly detailed reading, but you could usually discount all the other answers apart from 'Code compiles OK'! - So, look very hard for errors!
* There were a few questions on awt. Like what methods a listener defines.
* One easy question on Garbage Collection.
* Some questions on how arguments are passed to methods - i.e. can you modify an object through the reference, what happens when you re-assign it. What happens to primitives in method arguments.
All in all I think that the exam was fair. If you know the stuff in RHE and Exam Cram well, you should have no problem.
If anyone has any questions, feel free to email me or post here. Although I obviously can't give out specific questions that I was asked... as if you'd want me to anyway! That would spoil the fun!
Cheers guys,
Rich.
[This message has been edited by Richard Strutt (edited November 13, 2000).]