Preparations:
- Spent about two months studying about 1 hour per day.
- Read chapters 1-17 in O'Reilly Enterprise Javabeans 3.0.
- Read through Mikalai Zaikins Notes.
- Created one Interceptor class at work.
- Created one
EJB 3.0 Stateless Bean at home, with quick app to call it.
- Only mock I took was Sun's proficiency exam (the 10 questions), about halfway through O'Reilly book and got 50%.
- I have about a year's worth of experience working with EJB 2.0 beans, not creating them just using them via lookups, modifying, etc.
Actual Exam:
- Was easier than I expected it to be. I did not encounter any drag & drop questions, and I felt pretty comfortable. Questions were very straightforward, and there was not a lot of unnecessary ambiguity. It felt like you either knew it, or you didn't. I scored lowest on General EJB 3.0 Enterprise Bean Knowledge and Persistence Units and Persistence Contexts (66% on both). Not sure what happened on General knowledge, but I know that I didn't study a whole lot of Persistence Unit/Contexts so that was just fine with me. I scored 100% on EJB 3.0 Overview,
Java Persistence Entity Operations, Transactions, Exceptions, and Security Management, which ironically were the subjects I felt weakest in but turned out to know quite well.
Advice:
- Study Mikalai Zaikins notes, those summed up general key concepts quite well. I think it was useful to read through O'Reilly EJB 3.0, but the notes definitely were better to study than the book.
- Know when various resources are available to EJBs, such as in the constructor, lifecycle callback methods, etc.
- Know what causes transactions to be rolled back in Container Managed, and what methods are available to be called on the EJBContext, or EntityManager in both types of transaction management.
Next:
- I start my Master's Degree in late June, there are plenty of novels I'd like to read before then. First up, the Ender Sagas by Orson Scott Card, some Dean Koontz, and maybe throw in a Splinter Cell.... also going to lay by the pool a lot here in a few weeks.
[ May 05, 2008: Message edited by: Dustin Johnson ]
