I finally got around to taking the exam this past weekend. I had a very chaotic week leading up to it (engaged on an aggressive project at work, company announced it's being acquired, wife is 9 months pregnant, sick pets, etc.), so I'm quite pleased with the score all things considered.
While I develop in
java on a regular basis, it's very rare that I do much work in the
servlet space. Even when I do, it's using a 4.1.x version of
tomcat with the old servlet 2.2 and
jsp 1.2(?) specs. I had absolutely zero hands on experience with EL, but scored 100% on that objective. That subject area was very well covered in the book.
The only thing that really kicked my butt was developing with custom tags. This felt like a topic that was hard to learn from a book alone. I know I should've setup a tomcat 5.x environment and played around, but given I sit in front of a machine for 10+ hours each day, it was refreshing to just lay on the couch with the Head First SCWCD book.
In any case, I passed. I think SCBCD may be next.
-Gargamello