I just passed today.
Breakdown of my marks:
Declarations & Access control..................62 %
Flow control & exception handling..............57 %
Garbage Collection.............................100 %
Language Fundamentals..........................55 %
Operators & Assignments........................42 %
Overloading, Overriding, Runtime Type, and Object
Orientations...................................100 %
Threads........................................71 %
AWT package....................................50 %
lang package...................................50 %
Util package...................................100 %
I/O............................................100 %
Overrall I found the exam pretty hard. Advice I would give to aspiring SJCP's is this ( A.K.A. Things i got caught out on ) :
- Learn how to express primitive values in every way.
(You need to know how to express integers in hex, bin and Oct!!)
- Learn all everything about Classes that are mentioned in objectives
(Like
String, Vector (etc) and its methods and how they work)
- You must know the precence of every single operator
(I got hammered on this!)
- Know Threads (did better than i expected to here)
(I got a ton of qustions in this section, and some had code over 30 lines!)
- Learn the inheritance tree for Exceptions
- Don't Leave out (or just skim over) GridBagLayout
( I got 2 questions wrong here )
Recommended Reading: A Programmers guide To
Java Certification
by Mughal, Rasmussen
I wish I'd concentrated more on this book, I only picked it up two days ago. I think the questions are very similar in difficulty to the exam.
Also I didnt do many mocks, In fact I only did one (www.jchq.net mock 1, 65% 2 weeks ago) (mainly because I didn't like the ambiguity)
So Learn from my mistake and do as many as you can, even if they really annoy you!