Hello all,
As you might guess I'm a newbie here to the arena, although I've been paying vivid attention to much of the content.
I should clarify the subject of this post by saying that I did not intend on passing the exam! You see, my company pays for all of the certification exams I take and I decided to take it with very little preparation to get a feel for what's on the exam. I followed most of the suggestions posted on this site (Monson-Haefel's
EJB book, UML Distilled, the
Java Network Security article, etc.) but really only breezed over them. I did construct an outline scarily similar to the one posted recently by Mr. Wetherbie.
I was, however, somewhat disappointed when I left the exam yesterday with a passing score (a 68% mind you, nothing to be bragging about). I've never even developed a single bean before. I played around with them just a little (downloading the Sun J2EE tutorial and going about halfway through it). Nothing really involved with EJB's though.
Make no mistake: the exam is laden with EJB questions. I credit the fact that I got through these sections because I'm a pretty darn good test-taker.
My experience is chock full of Java, just no J2EE. I've been a certified programmer since 8/99 and a certified developer since 4/01. I've been doing various OO Java projects for over 2 years.
I am a little disappointed that I passed the exam though, mostly because I now hold the exam with a little less regard because a person with next to no J2EE experience and very little studying can walk in and pass it. I now know very little about J2EE (although I'm sure Part II will alleviate my worry there) and I'm one step closer to being certified. I guess I made my own bed there, didn't I?
Anyway, I credit my success to much of the content here. I've found it to be the best place to go to get your answers about certification. Kudos to Mr. Wetherbie for his information and best of luck to all.