Thank everyone :-)
Vivek,
I have not taken 287 or 486. Will mostly take them after scjd.
Satish,
I have given in detail
the way I had prepared for teh exams
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IBM 141 - XML and Related Technologies
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Preparation Time
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The total time taken was 2 months.
Time for finding resources, hanging out with friends, movies - 1 month
EFFECIENT TIME - One month
2-3 hrs Everyday for 24 days
4-5 hrs for the last 6 days
BOOKS
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Three Books
1. Professional XML (MAIN BOOK)
Almost covers all parts of exam other than security.
Chapters 2,3,4,5,6,8,9,10, 11, 12, 16, 20, 24
2. Essential XML Quick Reference - Aaron Skonnard (Author), Martin Gudgin Covers all topics except security, XSL-FO, XQUERY
3. Processing XML with
Java - Elliotte Rusty Harold
Chapters 6,7,8,9,10,11,12
Covers SAX, DOM - You dont need anyotehr book, tutorial if you go thro this book on these topics!!!
GET THIS BOOK!!!. It is the best book that I have read !!. The book is so interesting and informative. Apart from the certification it is an awsome book to add to your collection!!!
These were the only 3 books that I looked upon.
ONLINE CONTENT
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Other than the books, the online tutorials and sites I referred to were
1. w3schools.org
An introduction to XML concepts including basic syntax, DTD, Schema, Xpath
THIS IS teh best site for XML Schema that I have come upon. In fact I found this equivalent (and more clearer) than XML schema explained in XML Professional and Esential XML
2. IBM Developer works
I refered to these sites for XML Security (teh very basics) and XSL-FO
If you do a search on teh developer web site in IBM, you will come up with these articles
Other good sites for articles and other related contents that I refered to were
Namespaces -
http://www.rpbourret.com/xml/NamespacesFAQ.htm Entities -
http://tech.irt.org/articles/js212/#intro Schema -
http://vbxml.com/xml/articles/xsd/default.asp XSLT -
http://perfectxml.com/TipsXSLT.asp Quizzes and Exams
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XSLT - perfectxml.com/Quiz/XSLTQuiz.ASP
XML -
http://perfectxml.com/Quiz/XMLQuiz.ASP XML -
http://www.witscale.com/test141.html XML -
http://sys-con.com/xml/article.cfm?id=634 This site Gives a NICE explannation of what to really expect in the various sections in the exam and also has some example questions :-)
WHIZLAB
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I Had purchased Whizlabs exam simulator. It REALLY helped a lot in making me ready for what to except in teh real exams!!!.
BUt the mock exams were quite hard (The software gives you only 1 hr instead of 90 mins ). It really helped in getting myself prepared for teh exams. I didnt score very high on teh exams though I manged to clear them comfortably :-)
THE EXAM
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Well teh main exam was not as tougher as I had precieved it to be :-), Bou most of teh questions had ambigous answers(as far as I thought;-)) and during these times I used my common sense and elimination of wrong answers to come up with the right ones
there were no questions about security. 2 questions on
SOAP, 2 on UDDI, lots on XSLT (u have to know the exact syntax of teh elemnts for cerating questions ..For Ex. what are teh attributes of teh xsl:variable elemnt ..
Questions on SAX and DOM (5-7) were takeaways :-)
2-4 Questions based on XSL - FO
5-6 questions based on SCHEMA
2 questions on DTD
Otehr questions were on chooosing one technology over teh other !!!
I did have 20 mins to go through my answers (Courtesy of whizlabs ;-))
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IBM 486 - OOA/D using UML
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preparation Time : 2 months
EFFECIENT TIME - One month
3-4 hrs Everyday for 24 days (these were not continous
)
5-6 hrs for the last 6 days
BOOKS
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Three Books
1. Applying UML and
patterns - Craig larman
Wonderful book !!! thi should be made as the mandatory text book for all OOAD classes taught in universities. Too bad I dint know abt it
when I took OOAD
2. UMl Distilled - Martin Fowler
This book gives you a nice view abt UMl and is useful in interpreting UMl and knowing teh different UML diagrams
3. Design Patterns - Elemnts of reusable OO Software - GoF (Optional, but a good book to read !!!)
well I figured that, this is one book that is very essential if you want to know in detail about patterns. I was not able to go through teh entire book. Just went through the highlights of all the patterns (intent, applicability and structure)
would go through the implementation of teh patterns in teh forthcomming days
ONLINE CONTENT
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Downloaded a lot of materials, from the yahoo group --> ooad_meda
They have a huge collection of notes for this exam. The notes for the larman book is especially useful for last minute Revision.
WhizLabs
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As mentioned by other people, I feel I would have been totally lost without whizlab. It really gives you a very good understanding about what to expect from the exam. The 5 exams (1 diagnostic, 3 practice, 1 final) really prepare you for the exam.
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Hope this helps
Good luck
hari
). 
