I used HeadFirst
EJB for content.
For practice exams I used the Enthuware EJBPlus software and I also spent the 75 dollars for the Sun practice exams.
Overall the Sun practice questions were more realistic than the Enthuware questions. I would recommend spending the 75 dollars for the Sun material which consists of three 70 question practice exams. Also, the Sun exams were more reflective of my final score. I would recommend not spending money on the Enthuware EJBPlus exam simulator software, as the questions are not reflective of the real exam.
If you are using the HeadFirst EJB book, you know that the questions don't tell you how many answers are correct from the multiple choice options. This makes the process of elimination more difficult, since you don't know when to stop eliminating, and frequently end up with
analysis paralysis
. I think this is a good learning technique, but in the real exam, you will find that many of the answer choices are absurd and can be easily eliminated. Process of elimination is a good strategy for multiple choice type exams.
Here are some suggestions for how you might eliminate an option on the real exam:
Answer suggests that a MessageDrivenBean has a clientAnswer suggests that StatelessSessionBean is using SessionSynchronization interfaceAnswer suggests that an ApplicationException behaves like a RuntimeException or that a SystemException behaves like a checked exception [*}Answer suggests that a local interface behaves like a remote interface or vice versa.
Finally, I feel that it is impossible to do well on this exam without a large amount of rote memorization. In other words, if you feel you can intuitively
figure out
the answer to a question based on years of hands-on EJB experience, you are probably mistaken.
After getting spanked on practice exam after practice exam, I just resigned myself to the tedium of memorization and after that I started to smoke the practice exams. When I went into the real exam, I took my two empty pieces of paper and regurgitated the following items.
The UML diagrams at the end of the HeadFirst book. All of them, and I ended up needing to know every single interface in the diagrams, right down to method signatures.StatefulSessionBean and StatelessSessionBean lifecycle diagrams on page 223 of HeadFirst book. EntityBean lifecycle diagram on page 320 of HeadFirst book. ApplicationException hiearchy on page 548 of HeadFirst book.SystemException hierarchy on pages 551 and 552 {*}Allowable lifecycle bean method charts scattered throughout the book. Example on page 243. I compiled all of these little charts into one big chart for Session Beans and one big chart for EntityBeans. I memorized them in and out, and ended up using this chart constantly during the exam. This was very tedious but invaluable.
It took me about half an hour to get all of this information onto my blank pieces of paper, and about an hour to finish the questions, which left me an hour to spare. At first I was stressed about losing time during the exam to write all this down, but after taking a number of practice exams this way, I realized that I was finishing the tests
faster using this approach. Why? Because I could just refer to my notes for answering about 60% of the questions and didn't have to waste any time trying to figure the answer out. I believe that I could have passed the exam with just the information I memorized. The margin between my score and the minimal passing score I attribute to the excellent HeadFirst materials.
Cheers
