What I sincerely feel is that the concepts are more important!!!(Not the concepts as a chapter in SCEA)
Get the concepts in the proper place !! let us start with an example!! This is an example on design patterns.
Look at
https://coderanch.com/t/154405/java-Architect-SCEA/certification/Confusion-which-pattern If you go thru' the link you can see the same data but the questions are tweaked a bit and the answers are different.To be an architect I think what is more important is that
you should be able to generalize and think and apply common sense(I know common sense in not very common
). I do not claim but I feel two things are very important in this examination.
1. Ability to generalize a situation
2. Applying common sense.
One more thing is that, concepts always leads to a bias.Once you develop a concept it is very difficult to get out of it.So please be confirmed that before conceptualising something , you gave thought enough and can think no more.For example it took me some days to contemplate how template pattern can be used to develop a framework.Initially I did not understand it.I thought for somedays and finally hit upon a custom framework which I was using.I was using it all the time.I was a naive user of the framework and never really thought deep into it.What I did was that I put the entire framework in debug mode and browsed through it and started noting down the call chain.I found out that at a up the inheritance tree they have only declared some methods and implemented it much later ..I asked myself why are they doing it ? Then I bumped on the GOF book and did some reading on template pattern ... things started to get inside and now I think I can understand it ...but still I require expert opinion when I design with template pattern ..since I at times really get confused when to use strategy and template...when I should do delegation and when I should go for aggregation ...
This sounds a bit generic but .. I think thinking like this helps.
Another thing is to review the questions that you answered wrongly.Is good to fail ... you learn more
None of the topic here expects that you need to have a lot of coding experience in that area.For example security.If a company has 100 developers developing an application , only a few will be working on the security area.So it is important to have an understanding on the subject matter rather than appearing in the mock tests.
I personally am not a great fan of certification as I did not have very good experience with people who were certified.But I agree if a certification is done with a proper perspective , it can add tremendous value to your work and you can easily get noticed by the technical guru's.
I think you have the right books, only a mark cade and some links given by some ranchers here really would really complete the list.
Kindly be advised, the way you think matters most ... good luck