Hi,
I passed the SCJP6 with 61%.
It's not the score I wanted, but I'm still happy I passed.
This was a hard and tricky exam.
There were 60 questions:
- No serialization, or Scanner
- Plenty of OO concepts,
- Threads,
- Generics
- One wickedly difficult File I/O question.
- A lot more (which is a blur now)
It's been a long and hard road for me while studying for this exam because of a full time job, wife & kids and a busy personal life.
I had a large learning curve to overcome because I come from a non-programming background.
So I'm glad I won't have to spend all of my personal time studying anymore.
I would like to thank: (in no particular order)
-My family- for putting up with my long absences to study.
-Devaka Cooray- your examlab made the difference. I thought I had a good understanding of Java after completing K&B's SCJP6 study guide, but I was wrong.
I found your examlab so hard I almost quit several times!.
I didn't pass a single exam. But I'm glad I stuck it out and kept studying.
-Everyone here at the javaranch: Ankit, Costi, Henry Wong, Raju Champaklal, Bert bates, Punit, Deepak, K. Tsang, and many many more. You answered all of my questions and gave me good advice. I found a lot of answers to questions in the forums w/o posting.
-Kathy Sierra & Bert Bates- for the SCJP6 study guide and the Head First Java book, which was my intro into Java. If you're totally new to Java, like I was, then I recommend you read the Head First java book before moving on to other books.
-Please forgive me if I forget to thank anyone else
My Advice:
-Study like your life depends on it. Even though I didn't get the score I wanted, I felt studying gave me a firm foundation in Java. I work with a few java developers and they couldn't answer half of the practice questions, but they still knew their stuff.
-Take as many mock exams as necessary and then take some more. You may curse while taking them, but you'll be singing praises when the concepts become crystal clear.
-Write a lot of code. You can't seriously think you'll really understand Java very well if you don't write code. I re-wrote almost all of the code I found in the study guide and mock exams. You may pass the exam w/o practicing writing code, but I doubt you'll be able to write a decent program on your own w/o the book in front of you.
-Make the Java API your friend. Knowing the methods, packages and static field of classes will help you tremendously.
-Ask for help when you don't understand concepts: javaranch, Google, and co-workers/friends who know java are great resources.
My Next Step:
- Lots of sleep
- More sleep
- Opensource projects
- keep practicing
Thanks for reading my very long post.
-Fritz