james airey

Yeah. getting certified will make you look pro-active to your employers too, and maybe move you up the queue of the next people to be put onto live projects.
Additionally people who walk around the office who don't know your position will see you looking busy doing technical stuff, rather than see you wasting time.

You may not do it now - but you might get asked it in a job interview in the future. I wouldn't be doing the job I am now without studying for the SCJP, and learning a few things that I don't do in my day to day job.

I think an all round knowledge of a subject area is one of the strengths of the Java certs.

If you take the approach that soft skills is the same as claiming credit for other people's work, or sucking up to management when you should be working, then you've got a long way to go.

To me, people skills are the difference I can give be being employed on site in my offices rather than being replaced by a faceless programmer in a low-cost location. Being a naturally mathematically / logically inclined person, these soft skills don't come as naturally to me as they do to some other people, but I still recognise the need for them.

In direct use within the IT arena, soft/people skills are useful for:
+ determine requirements from users (understanding their needs and giving them what they want/need instead of what they say they want)
+ persuading people round to your way of thinking rather than battering them with assertions of your rightness or superior technical knowledge
+ building relationships so that you can ask for favours when you need them
+ motivating colleagues
+ presenting results / arguments in terms of benefits to the audience, rather than focussing on the technical features you enjoyed the most

I think it means AND too.
Probably doesn't hurt to document this interpretation though.

i think the int / long record count is one of the subtle differences they throw in to make the assignments different.
i couldn't see any good reason for it to be a long either.

I am taking the approach of hard coding the schema (in a Schema class), but I am also reading it from the DB when I load it, and validating that the 2 are the same.

i think the numerics in the db file are confusing.
if i remember correctly, some of them are genuinely numbers in hex form, and some of them go via a text format.

eg, the length of a field is a hex number, and needs to be read as such.
however the capacity of a room is a text number, so needs to be read as an int, and then cast as a char, or something like that.

i could be wrong though ...

you can get into a situation where you have a try catch block within exception code.
For example (excuse the pseudocode)
try
{
\\ some SQL Stuff
}
\\ handle exception
finally
{
try
{
myConn.close();
}
catch (Exception)
{
log("unable to close exception");
}
}
this might suit your situation.

following up this thread that got moved to the results forum.
you scored maximum in locking, while a lot of people recently have scored 40/80 or 44/80.
Wonder what you did differently?...

how about an internet enabled computer game.
you can run in solo mode, or as a server for many players, or as a client with many players.

is there anyone out there who scored higher than 44/80?
maybe if people with higher marks shared their design, we could see the difference...

That sounds like the sort of detail that could change from 1 version of the spec to another. If it's not specified, then I guess it's up to you.
Numeric would be more efficient in terms of memory.
Personally I think I would go with Alphanumeric, as you know it's not going to get messed about by rounding or dropping leading zeroes.
eg. if your number is 000124.500 then it may be displayed as 124.5
so if you are doing numeric, best to start with a 1, not a 0, eg 1000001, 1000002, 1000003 etc.

What's wrong with logging?
It's really useful.
If you just use System.out.println, your code will be harder to debug, and thus you will be making it harder for yourself.

I found prometric very helpful at tracking down past results. I had taken 2 exams using different candidate Ids, and they were able to sort out my problems and merge my accounts.

I don't like throwing exceptions for fun. I think they should only be used for exceptional circumstances.
I guess that means I tend towards returning true or false, but again that would depend on what problems you think you might encounter.
maybe I would do something like:
public boolean checkBar() throws InvalidBarException
{
try {
if (predictable problem){
return false;
}
else
{
return true;
}
}
catch (Exception e)
{
throw new InvalidBarException(e);
}
}