Well clearly you need at least 100 copies of each of my books
I'm not very well versed in the SCWCD exam or the books surrounding it. I tend to shy away from these certifications. I think the biggest part of the tests is being able to perform well in a
test taking scenario. The people who pass have proven basic competence (many who have the cert I'm sure are a lot more than competent) and the ability to do well on a test. That does not necessarily mean they are good people to have on my team.
I'm not saying this to discourage you from taking the exam at all or to discount the people who have. I just place a lot of value on the person and their ability to write software. And less on their ability to take a test. So I always make sure to interview people in a way to find out what kind of team member they will be, how are they doing on maintaining a positive
learning curve. I rarely even look at the exam cert's someone has or use that as a filtering criteria.
One of the most cluefull guys I know has never graduated college, or received a single cert but he is brilliant, knows 5 or 6 computer languages (
Java, Ruby, etc) and can talk about distributed architecture in his sleep.
I know this does not exactly answer your question but the question did not match the title anyway
So what do I recommend? Buy some of the books on cert's, buy the
J2EE Patterns book from Alur, Crupi & Malks, read everything you have time for. Then go build something. Open source it or what ever but build something, build a bloger, build a distributed calendar manager, whatever. Make it do as much as you can, use it as a learning exercise and don't worry so much about the feature set just make it have all the features required for you to learn. Then if I interviewed you I'd hire you because you have shown an ability to be self motivated, and that you have the ability to survive a step learning curve. Then if you want to get the cert as gravy go for it, it can't hurt and its nice to have all those acronyms behind your name.
My $0.02 worth.
[ March 05, 2004: Message edited by: Bill Dudney ] -- I just can't get that url right...
[ March 05, 2004: Message edited by: Bill Dudney ]