Thanks Shailesh, Vanitha, Akhil, Farooq!
Lots of resources are available for the exam - free on the net as well as for purchase. What I would suggest is
to study with the goal of understanding concepts by coding small programs & then practice selcted mock exams. This way, the study will be focussed towards mastering the exam objectives. The exam does test on certain points which a Java Programmer need not memorize or know by-heart in his/her actual work. So a focussed study is very much important apart from learning the language.
I would like to suggest as follows:
1. Take a print out of the objectives from Sun's site and mark it as and when you finsih studying objectives.
2.Take a good certification book (I used Roberts, Hellers & Ernest's book) and finish reading chapter by chapter.
3. Install JDK and code small programs to test the concepts.
Prepare notes and make note of interesting(or weird!) results.
4. Finish the test given at the chapter end. For whichever test you take,
read the explanation for both correct and wrong options! As William Brogden has rightly said in his Exam Cram book, the exam requires not only to check the correct options, but also to discard the wrong options!!
5. Now after completing this book,
probably another book such as Exam Cram by William Brogden (has lots of trick questions) may be used. Here again finish all the chapters
6. Study Java API documentation for java.io, java.util etc and prepare notes. 7. Refer to Java Language Specification(JLS) whenever doubts arise or when ideas appear to be conflicting in other resources! In my opinion there is no substitute for going through the Java API documentation and JLS and I did refer to both of these frequently. 8. Also when some topics require more study,
referring to other resources such as tutorials/articles from Sun's site, Marcus Green's tutorials etc helps a lot.
Participating in technical discussion forums such as JavaRanch, jchq is good and helps to improve confidence.
9. Now can start doing mock exams from the net. Actually for me, it required a second reading of Threads, Inner classes & AWT before getting ready for mocks.
If doing mock exams from the net or going through JLS is a difficult task and if high percentage is desired in the exam, then may be, one can think of getting commercial products available for the exam preparation.
10. When working with mock exams, it is better to do the follwoing:
a) Create
an actual test environment by not referring to books or other resources. Also try to take a test in one shot without giving break.
b)
Try to convert "taking mock exams" as a learning tool. So there is no point in finishing 3,4 mocks on the same day without proceeding ahead with learning. The results from mocks can be best used for identifying the weaker sections and areas where the concepts are not clear.
c) After finishing 1 or 2 mock exams,
study the weaker areas and code programs to strengthen the learnt concepts before taking mock exams again
d) Lots of mock exams are available on the net. My opinion is that there is no need to attempt all these exams. Instead, one can
select a few exams and then plan when to take them. Date of the exam, time spent, score, URL, weaker sections etc may be recorded in a work sheet so that it can be referred later.
Jonh Hunt's exam, Rules Roundup game, Barry Boones' tests, Marcus Green's exams, Khalid Mughal's test, Sun's sample test are some from the net which I found very useful and which in my opinion, no one should miss! Also don't miss to take the final mock exams given in the certfication books.
Hope this helps.
All the Best!
Gaja Venkat
Sun Certified Programmer for Java 2 Platform.
