I took the exam yesterday and passed with a 67% 40/59. I am not a
JAVA guy more a VB guy. I had no reason to take this
test other then just to learn the language. I don't even know if I will ever even use JAVA but at least I now know it. Can't hurt, right? This exam is very reasonable. It really is a test on the fundamentals. Let me give you the results of my mock exams and some advice to give you confidence. First for my exam prep. I read two books First, "The Java Programming Language" (Third edition) by Ken Arnold. I read Chapters 1-10 and then skimmed some of the others like I/O that pertained to the test. The other book I read was Exam Cram. The first book is good for learning the basics and the second was good exam work. The majority of my focus was on mock exams. I seem to learn better from seeing than reading. So here were the results. I took several right off the bat a received in the 50-55 range. Then I took Marcus' three exams 53, 55, 53. Not quite good enough. Then I got JQPlus since I had about one week to the exam and had yet to pass a mock exam over the passing mark of 61%. So the results 40, 45, 65, 50, 53, 53, 50, 55 and the random 88. I only got so high on the random since I had already seem 95% of the questions through the other tests. So the real exam is kind of easier than allot of the mock exams so don't worry if you are struggling on them.
Now for exam advice. I/O was very easy I got 100% on that basically all you need to know is what parameters the various methods take it's as simple as that. And almost all of them only have one parameter anyway. Oh yeah and know that setting true as a second parameter in some of the methods allow you to append to the file and not overwrite it. And now how to move the file pointer with seek(). All the questions were very familiar from mock exams. Maybe 5 or 6 I/O ?'s.
Threads were just as easy got 85% on that 6 out of 7. I thought these would be tough but again the mock exams taught me the fundamentals and that�s all you need.
There was one 3-4 on AWT. Nothing hard. More theory than code maybe one code sample on button placement.
There was 3-4 fill in the blank on what is the output of code using various functions. Again nothing that you haven't encountered.
There were 2 on incrementing operators. A bunch on value of array elements and what the defaults are set to for like int, boolean and the such. There was one on GC. When object is available to be colleceted. I got it wrong and thought I knew garabage collection so look at the mock questions that show a segment of code and a ask after which line the object is available. That is the type you will most likely get on the SCJP2 exam.
That�s about all I can remember so don't sweat the test just understand the fundamentals and you will be all set. One other piece of advice understand Pass by reference and pass by value. There are probably 4-5 that pertain to that. And relax during the test just roll it if you don't know the answer just guess, mark it to come back and don't even think about it till you come back to it and focus on the next question.
Best of luck,
Ian