...score wasn't great, 76%, but I'll take it
As background, I started studying during the last week of August;
spent approximately 20hrs/week. While I'm a Notes Developer I do
not have a programming background (originally a Certified General Accountant). I've dabbled with a number of languages: Basica, QBasic, Rexx, LotusScript ... mainly used to write quick one-offs to manipulate files. I have no practical experience in
Java programming and do not use it at work.
My score broke down as follows:
Declarations and Access Control100%
Garbage Collection100%
java.lang package100%
java.io package100%
Language Fundamentals88%
Flow control and exception handling85%
java.awt package75%
Overloading, overriding, Runtime type57%
Threads57%
java.util package50%
Operators and assignment42%
Not sure what happened with operators and assignments. Had no
problems with them on the mocks. There were a two or three
questions involving prefix/postfix operators, 1 shift question,
two involving short-circut operators and one on ~. Think my
downfall was the prefix/postfix and mixing up precedence.
4 questions on Collections. Make sure you know which are
ordered/unordered.
5 questions on Threads, 3 involved code. One 30-line question.
AWT questions centered on Layout Managers and what happens when
you resize containers. Make sure you know the default layouts
for the containers and how they handle preferred size.
4 or 5 code examples with loops. Read Ajith's tips! Came across
a few of the standard traps. Especially watch out for non-boolean
loop expressions!
io questions were fairly straight forward. Need to know the
constructors for the main stream types.
4 or 5 questions involving
String and StringBuffer. They were
fairly straight forward if you remember that Strings are
immutable.
2 array questions. Need to know how they are initialized and
legal assignments. One involved multi-dimensional arrays.
1 question relating to main().
1 GC question.
Had one 'is a' vs 'has a' type question.
2 on Anonymous classes.
4 or 5 on access modifiers; what can be used where.
2 or 3 on inner classes.
1 on identifying keywords.
A few questions centered around constructors.
One dubm thing I did (even after reading all the warnings
)
was to spend too much time on questions I didn't get right
away. I ended up with 30 minutes to go and 14 questions which
I rushed through in 20 minutes and then spent the last 10
minutes re-checking them.
If you think you're taking to long on one question, mark it
and go on. You can always go back at the end.
As a whole, the questions were clearly stated. Not anywhere
near as amibiguous as you find on the mocks. There were two
strange ones; they asked what value of var x would be output
by line x; then line x was blank! I made the assumption that
a System.out.println should have been on the line in question.
Think this was right in one of the cases as it involved
a String and scored 100% on the java.lang section; no idea
if my assumption for the 2nd question was right.
Well, that's all I can think of for now.
For those of you still to write ... make sure your fundamentals
are sound; and write as many pieces of code as you can!
------------------
Jane
The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity.
-- Dorothy Parker
hope u will continue to be a bartender.
