Hi to all ranchers -
Passed with 91%. What a relief ! I am sharing here some of my preparation experience.
First of all, I would like to thank all the Javaranch folks and thanks to Dan Chisholm for his nice and enriching mocks. J@Whiz helped me in getting the "not so difficult ones" correct, and its practice mock sessions helped me in keeping focus and alertness throughout the exam. This helped me in avoiding the silly mistakes.
The most difficult questions were from threads and garbage collection. I got the gc ones correct, but I messed some of the
thread questions.
My preparation was exactly for three months. It started with Roberts and Heller book. Completed almost all the mocks in Javaranch. However, even at the end of these mocks, I was not feeling exam confident. Then I came across Dan's topic-wise mocks. That not only exposed me to a lot of fundamental questions, but also directed my attention to the JLS, which I had not seen till then. So at that point I read some of the JLS. This was around a month ago.
Purchased
J@Whiz1.4 just then. This exposed me to a variety of questions on Assertions, Collection, hashCode and equals, which immensely boosted my confidence. For the last six J@Whiz mocks, I consistently scored above 90%.
However, almost throughout, I felt that I was not doing so well in remembering the APIs and their signatures (like wrapper, StringBuffer, Collection classes, etc..). This was not only affecting my score, but was also instrumental in lowering my confidence in general. This is where I posted a question in Javaranch and Dan suggested to me to make some FLASH
CARDS for the APIs. This was just a week back. These flash
cards were of immese help till the end.
So that's it. I hope this will be of some help to someone.
Now I have a question regarding the next certification for which I should prepare. I am good at Swing API's (did a small project on that) and attended some classes on advanced
Java (RMI, Serialization, etc..),
EJB and
Servlets. Can someone suggest which will be EASY for me,
SCJD or SCWCD ? Or something EJB/Servlets related from Weblogic/Websphere ? Is anyone aware if there is some certification in C sharp language, which is similar to
SCJP ? Also I am considering the XML certification. How difficult is that ? I have some exposure to XML (at working level, nothing theoretical).
Thanks to all,
Sudd
