Hi All
Today I took the
SCJP 1.5 exam and passed with 83 % (60 out of 72). I want to share my story with others..
Started preparing for SCJP summer last year with Phil Heller book (1.5). Completed the reading, exams etc but felt that the new topics like generics, collections were not at all covered well in that book. So waited for K&B and waited and waited....
Finally Jan this year bought that book, completed the first pass of reading, did exercises after reading the chapters. It is very important that you make notes all along, they help very much in the end.
Then I did a second pass, some from my notes, some from the chapters etc and did chapter exercises again, I was fairing all most similar(but a little better) to the results in first pass.
Then I read the MZ notes.. they are very good although very intense and deep, I updated my notes with new findings etc.
Then I took Phil Heller book mock exams, they are quite easy. They claim that there are 4 exams but actually its a small pool of questions and those 4 exams are only a shuffle of each other.
Then I took the Marcus Green mock exams(60 or so questions). I used to do it 10 questions at a time, updated my notes accordingly.
I also did the mock exams at jchq.net. They are also good.
Then I read the Generics tutorial from Sun, it is very good.
All along I never had a chance to actually take a 3 hr mock exam( example from the K&B book). Since I had already scheduled the exam for today, I was little scared also about I decided to go for it instead of postponing the date. I just revised my notes twice in the last week and thats it.
The exam questions were good. The concurrency questions were trickier and time consuming mostly asking the output of the code snippet. The DragNDrop questions weren't that tough as the noise is. If you know the stuff, they are easy and quick to do. The only thing I found was that the drop operation doesnot work all the time. Sometimes I had to do it few times in order for the dragNdrop to succeed. I recommed that people watch for the mouse cursor during this operation. If the cursor is a circle with a bar crossing it, this means the operation wont succeed, if everything is well, it will change to an arrow with a rectangle underneath it.
I faired 68 in concurrency, 100 in collections&Generics, Declarations. 62 in OO (which was a surprise), rest of the topics had in 90s.
I had 10 mins left at the end, decided to review some of the Marked questions. When I tried to review them, most of my marked were "TASK" questions meaning dragNDrop, so it used to ask me that the previous answer will be lost if I decide to review my answer. I quickly said "No" as I did not want to redo it.
And then I pressed the END button. It did not tell me the result and just said that the report will print at the office. I went outside hoping to hear good news and went at the desk. She told me congrats and what a sigh of relief !! I did not care about my marks at that time and then saw it when she handed over the marks sheet to me.
So I highly recommend K&B 5.0 . There hasn't been any other SCJP book since THE BIG BANG !
My next attempt would be for
J2EE, havent decided which one yet.
Thanks & Good luck to all of you.
God bless
-Rupak