Hi everybody, I just passed the exam a few hours ago and I feel so happy ! I hoped to get a score consistent with my SCJP score (95%) and I was afraid it would not be the case. I found the SCBCD exam more difficult than the SCJP one, not to attend (same level IMO), but to study. In comparison, there is much more to know "by heart" and this is not my cup of tea. I'd like to send special thanks to Kathy and Bert for their incredibly great Head First EJB book. They made all hard stuff so easy to understand and memorize ! Moreover, you never get bored while reading. I really enjoyed studying with that book. Just two little advices for those who use it : 1) take your time for the first reading (doing all exercises) 2) while reading the comics and small aside stories, use a highlighter when you feel something is important (so you'll be much faster in your second reading). BTW, I much regretted that I didn't use the book that way myself. A special thank to Valentin Crettaz too. His cheat sheets are so helpful ! The real exam is easier than the few mock ones I could try (including the final mock exam included in Head First EJB). I bought two commercial mock exams (softSCBCD and Whizlabs SCBCD) but, unfortunately, I was too short of time to use them as I'd have to. I couldn't try more than 2 out of 5 softSCBD mock exams and just 1 out of the 5 from Whizlabs. Both products seem helpful though. Useful to know : you have *plenty fo time* to complete the exam. I finished all questions in about one hour (you get two), so I could review *all* questions, not just the ones I had marked for review. It's interesting to know, because those people who have low confidence in their memory may spend a few minutes to throw on paper anything which could help them during the exam : life cycle diagrams, hard-to-remember DD elements, etc. I spent 5 minutes with that. While studying, I found easy to remember the life cycles diagrams, the various classes and interfaces, and what is/should go in them. But I found much harder to remember which are the parts of its "beanness" a bean may access during its life cycle. Knowing what the "beanness" things are, I found this trick very helpful :
Good luck to all of you ! Best, Phil. [ December 12, 2003: Message edited by: Philippe Maquet ]
Philippe, F�licitations! Grand Score! Bon Travail! .... (Congratulations! Great Score! Good Job!)
Philippe Maquet
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Ton fran�ais semble excellent, Vish ! (Your French looks excellent, Vish !) Thank you for your kind message. Phil. [ December 12, 2003: Message edited by: Philippe Maquet ]
Great Score!! Congratulation!!I am also preparing for it and probably give it a shot end of this month.were there any thing in the exam that you wished you could have read more or done more practice on?thanks. [ December 12, 2003: Message edited by: Namaste Sathi ]
Great Score Phil! Congratulations! I am studying for this exam myself. Need some time to pass it though. Warm Regards and keep in touch. Bharat
SCJP,SCJD,SCWCD,SCBCD,SCDJWS,SCEA
Philippe Maquet
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Hi Namaste, Thank you.
were there any thing in the exam that you wished you could read more or done more practice on?
The only thing I'd wish more is one more day to study... The worst thing I had to study has been the DD syntax. There is no consistent naming convention in the DD, in such a way that knowing them "by heart" was very hard to me. Now I noticed that on the real exam people at Sun don't try to trap you by fake DD elements (or there are obviously fake) as the commercial mock exams do. But I didn't know that, so I spent too much time on the DD IMO. Best, Phil.
Philippe Maquet
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Hi Bharat,
I am studying for this exam myself
We'll keep in touch at least here then if not on the SCJD forum. Nice !
Philippe, Way to go, great score . Now you have no more excuses not to get cracking on finishing up your SCJD. . I want to see another great 3-tier score ! I trust that YOU won't be tempted by the dark side. I'm just getting started on SCBCD now and I hope it isn't as bad as you say regarding memorization. I'm an old fart (52) and naturally that's much harder for us than the youngsters. I've always hated memorizing anyway. I'm really enjoying working with Kathy & Bert's book. Ed Roman's book is good too but Headfirst is a lot more fun and should make the memorization more bearable.
kktec<br />SCJP, SCWCD, SCJD<br />"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." - Werner Heisenberg
Now you have no more excuses not to get cracking on finishing up your SCJD. . I want to see another great 3-tier score !
I'll finish it of course (I'd be crazy to give up when 85% of the whole job is done). But I have now another priority for the next cert and probably another job also which will influence my cert planning too. I must confess that while I studied for SCBCD I missed more the SCJD forum than my SCJD assignement.
I'm just getting started on SCBCD now and I hope it isn't as bad as you say regarding memorization. I'm an old fart (52) and naturally that's much harder for us than the youngsters.
Same for me ! But if you read what I posted above about the DD, on the real exam, you have no question which require a *perfect* knowledge of the DD elements. For instance, you don't see any question which "play" with the lack of naming convention to make you fail.No questions with a "primkey-class" and a prim-key-field" slipped in just to make sure that you know that both are wrong (should be "prim-key-class" and "primkey-field") . For the DD, you just must be able to *recognize* normally spelled DD elements, you must know in which part of the DD you should put/find them, who is responsible to manage them, along with the structure of structured elements : you must be able to tell that <SubElementB> is a sub-element of <ElementA> for instance. If I had an advice to give you, I'd spend the time you need, cool, to first deeply understand the whole EJB technology (as I hate "by heart" stuff too, that's what I did BTW). At the end of this first step, you'll be surprised of the numerous "by-heart-stuff" things you know already (without any specific effort) : I mean the life cycles, the home and compoment interfaces + the 3 contexts, the CMT transaction attributes and the way they are used, etc. Then finish by the DD, which is messy (hence hard to study), but for which Valentin helped a lot with his DD example. He had the great idea to use colors to enlight the different responsabilities (that you must know BTW) and to present it *as a whole* (for me it was easier to study it as a whole than divided in chunks as in the book, but maybe it's a question of personal taste). Best, Phil. [ December 12, 2003: Message edited by: Philippe Maquet ]
Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen. - Robert Bresson
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Phil, Thanks for the tips and the info about the lack of obnoxious (and pointless!!) trickery in the test. It helps to know that I will be able to rely a lot on knowing how things work and being able to figure stuff out from that. That's the way it should be. Back in ancient times, when I was in school, the hardest math and science tests were the "open book" type that tested your understanding and problem solving ability. That kind of knowledge is way more useful than any rote memorization that will be instantly forgotten once the test is over. I've also been studying the concepts behinds AOP lately so the workings of EJB don't seem so mysterious anymore as that is essentially what it is all about.
setXXXContext()BIZ<remaining>------------------------------------STATEFULHOME + JNDIALLALL BUT CMTSTATELESS v vID + JNDIsetXXXContext()BIZejbCreate()ejbActivate()<remaining>Home BIZejbPassivate()---------------------------------------------------------------------------ENTITYHOME + JNDIALLNO IDNO TX/NO SEC/+JNDI ALL
Can you give more explanation on this cheat sheet. I think this will be really helpful for me as well. (and maybe others) Thanks!
Originally posted by Pranil Kanderi: Congrats Philippe Great Score!
Can you give more explanation on this cheat sheet. I think this will be really helpful for me as well. (and maybe others) Thanks!
Ditto. Maybe the "code" tag screwed everything up
I'm not going to be a Rock Star. I'm going to be a LEGEND! --Freddie Mercury
Philippe Maquet
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Hi Pranil, Shown as you did above, I guess this cheat sheet is hard to understand. So I reproduce it here :
Why this short cheat sheet ? You must know the "beanness" things *and* which of them are available within a given method (callback or business method). At first sight it was hard for me to remember that stuff, so I decided to use that trick when I noticed that :
many methods/callbacks have the same access
where there are a lot of allowed accesses, it's far easier to remember what's *not* allowed
Here are the symbols translations : setXXXContext() : obvious BIZ : business method Home BIZ : home business method <remaining> : any method not listed elsewhere ALL : any access is allowed HOME : get a reference to your home JNDI : access to your special JNDI environment ALL BUT CMT : any access is allowed, except calls to getRollbackOnly() / setRollbackOnly() (I didn't write "NO TX", because any BMT stuff is allowed) NO TX : no access to getRollbackOnly() / setRollbackOnly() NO SEC : no access to security information (getUserPrincipal() and isCallerInRole()) Of course, to find this micro-cheat-sheet useful, you *must* know by heart which are the "beanness" things and which are the possible callbacks. But as you must know them anyway ... Hope it's clearer. Best, Phil.
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