Anybody heared of www.arc2patterns.com? - 40 diagrams for part2

[Rudi Vaum]

Hy everybody,
I just received an unexpected email from www.arc2patterns.com;
They wanna have about 100-150$ for some SCEA training products.
The description on the website looks quite ok,
but I never heared of these guys.
They say they have "40 illustrative diagrams with more than 80 pages of documentation" for part 2 - it looks good: http://www.arc2patterns.com/scea2_product_overview.html
This is the email I just got:
=======================================================================
Hi,

We would like to introduce ourselves as Arc2Patterns Team. We offer Sun Certified Enterprise Architect Study Guides Step 1, Step 2 and Step 3. Industry experts, who are SCEA also, develop all these study guides. These guides are featuring all necessary objectives with proper explanation and explanatory diagrams.

Moreover all of these guides are with Money Back Guarantee.

For further details you may visit:
www.arc2patterns.com/products.html
www.arc2patterns.com/scea2_product_overview.html
www.arc2patterns.com/money_back.html

We guarantee your success.

Regards,
Arc2Patterns.com Team

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[ October 02, 2003: Message edited by: Rudi Vaum ]
[ October 02, 2003: Message edited by: Rudi Vaum ]

[john rams]

part1 is not useful .Most of the questions were taken from whizlab simulator

[Stephan Merick]

Hi Rudi,
I'm one of those passive reader of JavaRanch. I've passed my Step 1 with 83% and waiting for Step 2 result. I've used arc2patterns step1 and 2 guides. Unfortunately I got arc2patterns Step 1 product, 7 days before my Step 1 exam and so was unable to utilize it properly but in Step 2 I've got very good help from that guide. I found those guides are very good help for me.
In Step 1 it contains a set of good questions based on exam requirement. If we understand all of them, it'll be easy to cross that exam score barrier. You'll get a good grip of the topics. Step 2 contains tips and expls, which are necessary to crack the exam requirement. If you know J2ee and UML and need a helping hand, you may go for arc2patterns guides.
Regards,
Stephan

[Kelvin Chan]

For part 2, if you are looking at the most update version of petstore you may get confused by what is in the guide. The guide is copy from another based on the old version of the petstore.
Actually I think the guide is just a summary of other guide.
I end up reading the source code of the petstore and find it offer a lot of help. (My assignment use WAF).

[Levent Gurses]

I'd begin by asking myself what my real SCEA objective is. Given that I'll be spending considerable amounts of time with the assignment, it would be nice if I have a clear idea about my expectations from this certification.

If you think you can learn while doing the assignment then you should not need exam simulator or cheat sheets. You may need Sun Blueprints, Core J2EE Patterns, SCEA Study Guide and maybe J2EE APIs (Servlet, JSP, EJB), and most importantly time to digest. Yes, one should be ready to spend a lot of time thinking, designing, scrapping, starting all over again...

It is funny how just by using your own knowledge, experience and imagination you can create a much nicer solution that what's inside some of the cheat sheets. One can appreciate this exam only so much because it gives the opportunity to think in terms of original ideas, not blindly following some "smart" guides. In other words, ideas are the currency of this assignment. Sources are only as good as ones ability to scope, twist and apply them skillfuly to their domain.
[ December 13, 2005: Message edited by: Levent Gurses ]