Dear all,
I just cleared SCWCD with 84% and would like to share some information about my preparation for whoever might be studying to pass the same cert.
1. Study material (in strict disorder):
- the JavaRanch Forum posts (thank you all, btw :-)
- "Head First
Servlet and JSP" (HFS) + errata (
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/headservletsjsp/errata/ )
- some chapters from the old edition of "SCWCD Exam Study Kit" (ESK) and the final review section
- some sections of the Servlet spec (SRV.8 on Dispatching Requests, SRV.12 on Security, SRV.13 on Deployment Descriptor, the API sections)
- some sections of the
JSP spec (JSP.2 on EL, JSP.5 on Standard Actions)
- Marco Tedone's amazing SCWCD reminder (
http://www.jemos.co.uk/internal/ )
You might wonder why I used an outdated book (my copy of ESK was for exam 310-080)... That's because I've been wanting to take the exam since last year and took a lot of time to pick a date, in the meantime the exam had changed.
Anyway, keeping HFS as the main source, information in some chapters of the old ESK was a good complement (for instance, Classic Tags) and the final review was quite helpful - always keeping in mind that some information is not relevant.
In the end I think one good book backed by the specs does the trick.
2. Practice material:
- trying out examples from HFS and checking for "error" cases (I like to know what really happens when the book tells me "if you do this it will not work")
- exercises from and after the HFS chapters and the final mock exam
- exercises from selected chapters of ESK
- tests from the free trial version of the Whizlabs SCWCD 1.4 Exam Simulator (
http://www.whizlabs.com/products/scwcd/scwcd-details.html )
- javaprepare.com 's sample questions (
http://www.javaprepare.com/scwd/quests/questions.html )
- Anand Chawla's free mock exam (
http://www.podar.net/scwcd/ )
I also downloaded the free trial version of EnthuWare's JWebPlus (
http://www.enthuware.com/jwebplus/index.html ) but didn't have time to use it - just like for the JavaRanch mock exam and the jdiscuss tests (
http://jdiscuss.com/Enthuse/jsp/ShowAvailableTests.jsp ).
One short note about the HFS final mock exam results: be it because it was late or because my little gray cells were tired, but yesterday evening I scored miserably (37 correct answers out of 69)... Sometimes the real score is a good night sleep away from any mock
test.
Well, hope this posting is of some help!
Thank you & all the best, not only for certification.
Ciao,
Michela
[ May 31, 2005: Message edited by: Michela Catizzone ]
