Sorry for late. Thanks Nitin. You are a great help. I expect you to keep supporting me.
Thanks Leon. My answers to your questions are as following:
<<(1) What best books can u recommend ?
I havenot read the 2ed of professional xml, so i cannot give you any suggestion on the 2ed. I own the first edition. It's too dated (it covers SAX1.0, XDR Schema - a M$' dialect) , not fit for the exam. The 2ed might be a good xml book, but I am bored with such books written by many authors. The concepts don't smoothly flow together, and it covers many technologies but fails to extend each.
XML Bible is another favorite among JavaRanchers (and another BIG size book). Also I have not read its 2ed. The sample chapters are pretty good. I've read through all the five. The explanations are quite clear and conversational in tone, the reading is easy and amusing. Bible covers most arena of the exam, but you need another book like
Java & XML as a complement.
And my favorites are Oreilly's books - "XML in a Nutshell" and "Java & XML". Oreilly's books are often written by one or two authors (McLaughlin spent 6 months writing Java & XML). Nutshell is concise, not so big size. You can read it cover by cover, or just use it as a reference which Bible lacks. But its DOM and SAX chapters are a little weaker, so I need another book for XML programming, that comes Java & XML. Java&XML's chapter 3 and 7 are very helpful for preparing the test.
<<(2) Is real experience necessary ? Because I saw someone passing 140 had no working experience.
Real experience can be helpful but not necessary, for test is quite a different way comparing real work (I have some experience on DOM and XSLT). Real experience can be helpful on such sections like Architect, XML programming, also XSLT. If you lack real experience,
you should do more practice. For instance, write codes using XML API; do lab exercise while viewing
Roger's tutorial on Schema; follow
zvon.org's tutorials on XPath and XSLT, and write some examples yourself, do test them upon a command line processor like instant Saxon(
Roger also provides a XSLT tutorial).
I find these websites helpful for your exam:
xfront.com- Roger's excellent tutorials on Schema, XSLT, articles on Schema. the best site for learning Schema. My Oreilly books lack this.
zvon.org - many tutorials and references. Learn their Xpath and XSLT tutorials.
xml.com and
IBM dw "XML zone" - huge amount of articles on XML.
as for DTD, Mapraputa gave three good resources:
http://www.javaranch.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=31&t=001957 Regards,
Doug
[ January 28, 2002: Message edited by: Doug Wang ]
