Hi,all:
I passed the SCJP5.0 with a lucky 89% today. The exam is not as tricky as I expected, but still not easy.
1) The exam result:
Throughout this summer(from early July to late August), I studied for
SCJP 5.0 very commitedly, approximatly 6-9 hours a day. Then I took the
test today (26-08-2005) in a local test center in Denmark.
The exam turns out to be a little bit easier than I expected, compared with the mock exams offerd by Whizlabs. I answered 65 correctly out of 72 questions.And the API, concurrency, collections/generic secion were incredibly 100% correct, while the flow control secton was disappointingly only 72%. I am very surprised about that as I have personaly been feeling that generic and concurrency are the most difficult part. The flow control should be easy for me, but I scored low. Maybe you can't really know what your strength is until taking the test. And I did spend much time on the generic and concurrency duriing prepartion.
The time elapsed so quickly that I had to read the questions very fast, especially those 'exhibit' questions with lengthy codes. There was one 'exhibit' question I didn't have time to read and then decided to select the answers randomly instead.
There was also one question I am completely blank with, which was about 'Given an example of a class and a command-line, determine the expected runtime behavior' of the exam objective.
2) Some useful materials:
Here is a list of the materials I used during the my preparation, ranked by the importance I personally perceive.
a) Whizlabs SCJP 5.0 Exam Simulator
http://www.whizlabs.com/scjp/scjp-5.0-details.html It is strongly reccomened that you type the codes of the questions with which you have problems in your favourite
IDE and try out other different possibilites. The complier is the BEST teacher ever!!!
b) SCJP Tiger Study Guide
http://java.boot.by/scjp-tiger/ Mikalai Zaikin,thanks for your excellent work! I was very impressed that there were some exam questions that quite resemble the examples in your study guide. I consider the sections about Enum, assertion,regular expression (String.split() method),formatting parameters ( %b, %c, %d, %f, %s) in format strings, are specially helpful.
c) JavaTM 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 API Specification
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/index.html I used it a lot when learning serialization, euqals()/hashCode(), collections(The interface and implemented classes of Set, List and Map; The arrays classes and collections classes), comparable.
You don't have to memorize them, but at least, you have to read the introduction part about each classes/Interfaces mentioned by the exam objective.
d) Tutorials for the new features;
Documentation on enhancments in J2SE 5.0
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/language/generics.html http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/language/foreach.html http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/language/autoboxing.html http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/language/enums.html http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/language/varargs.html http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/language/static-import.html The generic is a bit hard to grasp, I suppose .
e) Thinking in
Java, four Edition.
It refreshed up some of my fundamental knowledge about Java 1.4.And I have been refering to this book frequently for a long time, not only during the preparation period.
3) A few tips:
There are traps in the exam questions which you may easily fall in.The secret of the traps are to put some other 'fancy' distractions to divert your attention. Here are some tips I summerized during my preparation. It might be helpful for you to 'detect' the traps:
a)Always remember that an object field in a class needs to be initialized before use.
b)Always notice the scope of the local variables and make sure they are not used out of scope.
c)Always be alerted when you see an interface which has no public keyword in its methods declaration, which is implictly 'public'.
d)Always be alerted when you see a super class with 'has arg' constructor. Make sure its subclass has invoke his super's 'has arg' constructor.
There are many such rules and it is impossible list them exhaustedly. The real challenge in an exam is NOT memorizing the rules themselves but your familarity with the Java language. If you are not familiar enough with the language syntax, it is very likely that you are tempted to ponder upon those 'fancy' distractions, completely forgetting the rules.So do as many practices as possible.
4) Last words:
One of the reason that I consider this exam NOT so difficult is that the parts about the new feature in J2SE 5.0, e.g. generic, enum, turned out to be quite straightforward.Maybe the test design take into account the fact that not all the people have actually started to used the new features a lot in their works.
Thank you all in this forum!!! And good luck to those who are studying SCJP 5.0! You're most welcome to contact me for further information EXCEPT for the detaild exam questions.
Email:
levison@cs.aau.dk [ August 26, 2005: Message edited by: Wensheng Li ]