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Anyone taken the Altova certification yet?

 
Greenhorn
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Altova has jumped on the certification band wagon:

http://www.altova.com/certification_overview.html

Has anyone taken this yet and if so could they comment on it?

P.S. Not sure if this belonged in "XML Certification" or "Product and Other Certification" but I kind of thought it was more XML flavoured.
 
Greenhorn
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hi,
just cleared the ACXE. I would recommend this for taking ACXE:

If one is new to XML, better concentrate on XML Schema and XSLT,as this will cover an overall 50% of the exam.

As of XML 2.0 part of the exam, the most important is the naming rules(elt. name can start with : or - or _)

As of Schema (for about 20%) and the expectation is to understand the equivalance of a given Schema and DTD(8% of the exam) for a single instance document.(good example:sample Q.No:7).should also have a concrete understanding of the parameter entities and general entities and the priority of multiple declarations, external and internal dtds and most importantly the difference between PCDATA and CDATA and using CDATA for script langauages.
should also have a basic idea about wsdl(6% of the exam). (This is a good starter). The tutorial at the w3 schools is enough for SOAP.(this constitutes 2% for the exam).
And you need to have work out a lot on XSLT and XPath(14% + 16%). Topxml.com has a very good tutorial on this and we can have a free download of the examples in zip format and work all these examples and exercise with the free download of the XMLSpy Home edition.
And finally, a walk thru the manual and tutorial (free download from altova) is essential(20% of the exam). Working out the examples as directed in the tuts will be of a good help in understanding XMLSpy. The workouts include: create schema visually, making the complexType/simpleType global, transformation and the difference between the types of views.

If using only the home edition , a thorough read of the manual and tutorial of the enterprise/professional edition will do good since the home edition is a limited one. Things important with EE manual:

  • ability to understand the renaming/rearranging of the elements in the grid format as opposed to text format
  • things like converting an attribute to an element and vice versa in the instance doc as opposed to schema
  • managing projects
  • creating common schema for several different instance docs at a time
  • assigning the value of an element to an attribute using XPath

  • And finally make an overall go thru with the W3C recommendations (available at altova itself) and ensure that you know all the subtopics ( no need to remember each and every rule) and then take the 11 sample Qs(out of 12 Qs we have answers and explanations for only 11 Qs and they left out the Q regarding SOAP. I wonder why!) and understand the explanation(they provide explanation for only worng Qs. So, if you want to know all the correct answers and expl., I would recommend to finish off the sample w/o answering any Q.)


    And you are all set for the exam(no:A20-001 - $95 at prometric)
    All the best.
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