Sergei Iakhnin

I bought the exam last year at a discounted price and never got enough time to properly study for it. Finally when the expiry date came I had to buckle down and get through it. Wrote it today which was my last day before it expired. Exam was harder than the JWeb+ practice tests I took for preparation but my mark was actually higher than all of the ones I got on the practice tests. The types of questions were also very different from the jweb+ questions. There were a lot of arrange-the-pieces type questions, probably at least 10. I'm quite relieved to have passed and am now going to concentrate on forgetting as fast as possible all the info any decent IDE and an occasional Google search can provide me with. Cheers!

I think Bert's the only one at liberty to do so.

Originally posted by Bhavna Jharbade:
according to me the correct ans are 1 & 2. But the exam said 2 & 4 to be correct.wht do you all say?

Option 1 cannot be correct because scriptlets are inserted into the _jspService() method. Since you can't define a method inside a method option 1 will not work.

The book doesn't take very long to read because it's full of pictures and diagrams that take up a lot of the space. I read it in 1.5 weeks of reading on my way to and from work. I'll have to read several chapters again just to make the gazillion different tags stick in my memory but if you do servlets/jsp as your job you should have a far easier time.

Well done!

Originally posted by Smitha B:
Hi Sergei,

I am planning to give my exam next weekend.Since you have given the exam I needed some advice.

1.In multiple choice questions , do questions specify how many choices we have to select?

2.Also , my main question is If i plan to leave a particular question and come back to it later, how do you do that in exam? Do we have a mark button or something?

3.Do they give pencil ,paper in exam? Any specific things to carry for the exam?

4. And last, as my id is passport sufficient.In prometric site they have indicated they need 2 ids ,one with photo.My drivers id has my maiden name so i guess that wont work.Will my credit card work work has second id?

Cheers
Smitha

Yes to all four. As far as ids go I think they want to see the same signature on both ids. As far as bringing things goes, I don't think you are allowed to bring anything in there anyway (pen and paper will be provided). Going back to questions is easy, you can mark questions and you can go back to any questions whatsoever just by clicking on its number once you have gone through them. Personally I found the testing application to be horrible though. It reminds me of Windows 3.11 applications by its interface.

You just need to know 2's complement to be able to negate binary numbers so that when you need to evaluate 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1011 you don't start pulling hair but instead know that it's -5

Originally posted by Barry Gaunt:



Well, um, ah, ouch, yes. Moral: When you are at a party, never slip away for five minutes to checkout SCJP. Just have another drink and relax.

Dionysus' revenge is swift for those who betray him thus.

I wrote mine yesterday and my advice to you would be to just try to be relaxed going into it. I would advise against last minute cramming as it will most likely do you no good. Also, don't do too many mocks beforehand or you'll find it hard to concentrate. I personally only did one a day. The day I did two I scored much lower on the second one and found it hard to keep my attention on the questions. Know that if you have prepared properly you will have plenty of time to answer the questions (took me 1 hour to answer), and with that in mind don't rush through the questions. When looking at code pretend you are the compiler going through it and make sure all the basics are there because there are always a few questions that can be answered in a split second by observing some key detail. Good luck!

Originally posted by Marzo Kaahn:
Sergei, what trick?

There is no one trick that will let you solve all the questions easily you just need to be observative about what they are asking you to do in a particular question. But if you are doing a question where you find yourself having to multiply 431531 by 85923523 in with only the pen and piece of paper that they give you then you are obviously missing something key.

The will do things like shifting integers by 33 for instance. There you know that you only need to shift by 1 as a result. Or they will downcast the result to a byte so you know that you only need to look at the 8 lowest bits which will be some small number.

You will need to remember two's complement well and be able to convert any base to binary well. With that mastered you shouldn't encounter any problems.

That can't be -1. It's a positive number that's equal to

0000 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 (binary)


I'm fairly certain they will never ask you to convert such a number to decimal. But they might to binary, which is much easier. As far as I know pretty much all questions on this topic are easy and if they look hard to you then you're missing a trick that will make it easy.
[ August 15, 2005: Message edited by: Sergei Iakhnin ]

Yaay Now I can go on vacation and forget everything I just learned.

For preparation I read Khalid Mughal's and Rolf Rasmussen's excellent book one time through and did whizlabs' mock exams. The results I got in the real thing are quite consistent with what I observed during my mock exams. My mean score over 9 mocks was 85.4%. I was thus really happy to receive 88% because I was expecting to do a little worse than on the mocks due to anxiety of writing the real thing and doing an exam in an unknown location.
My per-topic distribution of marks is very similar to the one obtained in the mocks with Collections and Declarations and Access Control being my weakest areas. The first because of not caring to remember the signatures of all the little methods and the second because of frequently missing syntactic nuances that make all the difference in seemingly easy questions. The exam took me 1hr to answer and 15 minutes to double-check. Next on the list is vacation to Europe. Second on the list is SCWCD.

A big thanks to all who participate in this excellent java resource that has helped me immensely in achieving my goal!

Originally posted by Dharmesh Gangani:
I understood what "Struan Kerr" had to say.
Actually, values of a final variable cannot be changed once assigned. In my case, i am creating a final object and this object holds some value.

I can very well change the value the object is holding because the object is declared as final. It means that i cannot change the reference to the object.

You would probably be better off to think of creating final references rather than final objects. It seems like this thinking was the source of your original confusion. Objects are not declared and cannot be final. It is references to objects that you need to think about. References basically tell you where in memory to look for an object. When you mark a reference as final after you make it point to one object you can't subsequently make it point to a different object.

I would like to point out that

a) --1 is not a legal expression in java
b) - -1 gives 1
c) -(3*10/5) gives -6 in most cases

My answer is a), b), c).

a) and b) because the | always evaluates both operands so if s is null s.length() will throw NullPointerException

c) because if s == to null then (s != null) will evaluate to false and consequently s.length() will throw NullPointerException.

Not d) because if s == null then || operator will short cirquit and not evaluate the second operand and if s != null then s.length() will not throw an exception.