Friends, just back from my exam and am happy to say that I have cleared
SCJP 1.5 with 86%.
Many thanks to K&B for a great book and thanks a ton to the
Java Ranch Forum and the invaluable advices from the ranchers.
My Preparation Books I just referred one book "Sun Certified Programmer & Developer for Java 2 Study Guide" by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates. And I must say this book is more than sufficient for anyone and everyone planning for SCJP 1.5
The contents completely cover the SCJP 1.5 syllabus (rather more??). The 2 Minute Drill at the end of each chapter is really very nicely written. I read this book twice and prepared some rough notes, the second time I was going thought the chapters.
Other notes referred 1. SCJP 5.0 Tutorials by Boot (objective wise pdf's available for download on the www)
2. Generics Tutorial by SUN (very boring and difficult to understand, never got a chance to read it complete)
3. SCJP Tiger Study Guide - MZ Notes (
http://java.boot.by/scjp-tiger/)
4. JMNotes and the JMMock exam
Mock Exams 1) K&B 2 Master and Bonus Exam - Went through each and every question very thoroughly and to tell you, the Real Exam Question difficulty closely matches the difficulty in the K&B mock exam
2) Marcus Green's online mock
test (
http://www.examulator.com) - Daily gave 5 tests of 10 quest each for last 15 days continuous (from it's free database of 62 questions)
3) Thoroughly did the Questions at the back of each chapter in the K&B book - May be twice or thrice
4) JMMock - Read once
To Summarise 1.The exam it's NOT a piece of cake, if there is lack of adequate preparation then there is a good probability of flunking the exam.
2.I can say that 50% of questions are tricky and the rest are very tricky
3.The questions require a lot of thinking; I was just left with 20 minutes when I reached the last question. So got very less time for review.
4.Beware of Threads (Concurrency) and the Generics Questions.Prepare well for these 2 sections
5.Double check all the Drag-Drop Questions, and avoid marking them for review. As the Answers will reset if you come back to the Drag-Drop questions for review later on Finally have been studying real hard (with 9 am � 9 pm office hours) for the last 1 month and really slogged for 30 hours in the last 2 days (Weekend) to get a bit of confidence to go for the exam.
As all said and done, need to take a good nap now
, then probably an outing to Sihanghad
in the Rains and back to work with SCWCD
Regards,
Dinesh Sundrani - SCJP 1.5
