I agreed with many posters that this is an exam that covered a lot of areas. I was pretty worried the night before my exam because of materials that I did not go through (or fully understand).
I got my SCWCD certificate 2 weeks ago. I decided to try my luck on the SCDJWS given I have a few years of
Java Web service experience. I still found quite a bit of things I did not know before when I went through the exam preparation, this is definitely a good learning experience for me. I would say that my background was mostly on WSDL and JAX-RPC (and JSR109) programming which are my strengths, some/partial knowledge on WS-I, XSD, architecture, DOM/SAX, but I am very weak on (or not much exposure) UDDI, security, JAXB, JAXR.
I went through the forum posts and got the 4 usual materials many people suggest, ranking from their importance, I would rank them as follow:
1)MZ�s study guide, many thinks to MZ!!! Covered almost all areas, and the materials covered resembles the ones in the exam a lot, the JAXB section seems to be enough for the exam, at least this was the only JAXB material I went through. Security and design architecture sections are good, which are something not being covered in RFH, and the coverage once again, more resemble to the real exam (than let�s say the blue print)
2)MZ�s quiz Went through this early in the morning before the exam as a last review. Found many similar questions in the exam.
3)RFH. This is a must read because this gives you the ultimate background/explaination on lots of objectives. I basically just gave up on the UDDI/JAXR chapters because I just could not find that I can memorize so much. Luckily for me, the exam just tests on the conceptual knowledge on the UDDI architecture, and does not drill too much onto the API level.
4)Blue print, personally, I do not found this as useful as the above 3.
As a general impression, I found that some questions on the exam may not be covered on these materials and need to use my common sense (and may be work by elimination) to find an answer. I considered some of them are more on the general
J2EE knowledge and may not involve Web services much. I was definitely very lucky since the exam does not focus too much on the API level knowledge which is an area I am not very strong (because of too much memorizing and lack of a handy environment to try out some of these things). In terms of security question, I think I got around 5 of them (instead of 10 as someone mentioned in another
thread), this was another thing I considered myself very lucky. WS-I was another area I worried a lot because of numerous rules in basic profile. Luckily the WS-I conformance questions were not drilling deep into some of those rules.
I also found that the SCWCD may help a little bit on the concepts but is not a must have for this exam. In terms of preparation effort, I found that I need to spend more time because of the uncertainty of what are being covered or not in the exam. An book targeted towards this exam (just like the Head First series) would definitely reduce the efforts/time being spent on getting this certification.
This is definitely a great relief that I passed this exam.
