hello all,
Took my
SCJP 1.4 exam today and passed with 95 %. very pleased with it.
Sincere thanks to the
java ranch community. you have been an immense help. I have been a silent reader of all posts in the scjp forum for past 2 months. From now on, I'm hoping to contribute my suggestions to future
test takers.
Thought I would share some suggestions so that it may help future test takers. K & B is the best book out there. Read and Re-read it thoroughly. All exercise questions in K&B are very important. Do them repeatedly until you get them all right. Also K&B mock exam very closely simulates actual exam. Take that exam at the very end just 1 or 2 days before the actual exam. What u get in the mock is what you will get in the actual exam.
Dan chisholm's site is very useful, particularly, objective wise questions (you will get many of them wrong the first time u try it). It will give you confidence to tackle any question beacause, each objective is covered with lot of detail.
As far as the actual exam is concerned, be very strong in following topics.
Arrays: will be initialized with default values whether or not array is declared within a method or not. be aware of all NullPointerException scenarios.
Object Casting: be thorough with all casting issues. i.e casting up an hieararchy. casting down an hiearchy. etc.
Operators: &&,||,|,^,&. Know the differences and be prepared to see lots of these with flow control-loops.
Annonymous and Inner Classes: be very thorough. sometimes these will be linked with
thread questions.
Garbage Collection: again be very thorough. can expect 1 or 2 twisty questions on these.
Threads: join(), sleep(), yield(), wait(), notify(), notifyall(). know everything about these.
String & StringBuffer: expect joint questions on these that illustrate their differing behavior.
Math class: know all method syntax and usage very well.
In short you can get very good scores if you prepare well for 30-40 days. Finally a big hug for kathy sierra and bert bates. They're the best.
Thanks
Srinath
