I have been lurking on this site for about two weeks. I took the Certified Developer Exam last Friday and I got 66/70 correct or 94%. There was only one question on the exam where I was completely baffled.
I would like to thank this community here. In general, I followed the advice of
Magnus Stattin. He got a 98%, so I figured that maybe I could follow his advice and barely pass.
It took about a week. I read Head-First
EJB twice and completed all the quizzes and exams in softSCBCD. Iu sually scored in the low 90s.
Read the Head First EJB. I really wished that I had access to this book when I first started playing with J2EE.. I believe that some of the difficult concepts that I used to have to check a reference or the little exceptional nuances - geEJBObject/getEJBLocalObject from
ejbCreate()/ejbRemove() in a stateless session bean?@!?! - that I barely understood are pretty well understood now.
Make sure you are fluent with bean state and access to the methods of EJBContext. I made a little spreadsheet that to quiz myself on the callback methods and access to methods of EJBContext. Since I knew that the
testing facility was going to provide writing material, I memorized the OID and state diagrams for message driven, entity beans, and stateful and stateless session beans. By the time I took the exam, I understood the concepts so well I did not waste the time committing them to paper.
I had previously read Monson-Haefel's Enterprise JavaBeans 1st and 3rd editions. I also completed the accompanying WebLogic Server 6.1 workbook and then migrated the example applications to Oracle's J2EE container, Websphere, and
Jboss.
Plus, I had previously read the J2EE spec. I reviewed the spec every time I missed a question on one of the quizzes in Head First EJB.
I am puzzled by a dialog box that popped up as I was reviewing the exam about the test application was communicating with something. I hope I did not miss one of the EJB-QL questions, because of that. The EJB-QL questions that I got were pretty easy. I had reread EJB-QL chapter in the spec prior to the exam. Maybe I missed the question, because I was getting a bit cocky or sloppy.
I took about 115 minutes which seems a bit atypical. I guess I am a bit slow.
Please, keep the whitespace in Head First EJB. It was refreshing.
I hope this helps.
Thanks again folks
Thermond
[ March 02, 2004: Message edited by: Thermond Adams ]
