Hai fellow ranchers,
Finally I passed
SCJP 1.4 today morning with 95%.
I missed 3 questions and no Jim they are not from Threads (I got 100% on threads)
1 from GC, 1 from assertions and 1 from arrays (okey..dont stare at me). I'm disappointed to find a couple of ambigous worded questions on GC & assertions. A question on assertions asks about the compile error but doesn't mention whether asseritions are enabled or disabled during compilation. I know for runtime we need to assume that they are enabled unless explicitly mentioned. But am not sure about compile time. WATCH THIS.
BTW, though
Thread questions are hard, knowledge of guaranteed & unguaranteed behaviour will get you through 90% of the questions. A day before the exam am studying only threads. specifically K&B threads chapter and dan's mock exams on threads. They are very close to real exam.
My preparation includes on/off for 2 months and 2 weeks of full time study. K&B is my main arsenal. It is enough to pass with 80+ score. I studied it 6 months back when am preparing for interviews. But didn't much concentrated on exam watch and chapter wise tests. This time I gave one serious pass through the book. After every chapter I did chapter's exercise and dan's topic wise mock's. BTW, they are excellent for learning purpose (as if no one commented before).
After finishing the book I started mock exams. I did almost every available exam on the net like javacertificate.com (a bit easy than the real exam), bill's (very tough),
java prepare, jdiscuss....There are around 2000+ freely available questions.
2 days before the exam I started reviewing all my wrong answers in mock exams. Also did marcus green & k&B mock's. my scores MG-98, K&B1-95, K&B2-93. Also skimmed through K&B once again.
MG & K&B mocks very closely resemble the real exam. I even got 4-5 questions with exact wording. and if u still insist...okey, I took .5 seconds to answer those questions.
And that's my success story. Above all I wouldn't have achieved this score without the help of my fellow ranchers. During my preparation I found discussion thread's on almost every mock exam question so that I don't need to post a question and wait for the response.
It's time to celebrate.
Cheers
-Suresh
