I'm happy to report that last Thursday I passed the
SCJP 5 exam. (I've previously posted on JavaRanch under the pseudonym "Matt Caripto", but was recently persuaded that real real names are better). As is traditional, I thought I'd inflict my retrospective opinions upon y'all (does that sound American enough?)...
I found Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates' book (K&B) invaluable. It's well-written (and witty), and the authors actively maintain a list of errata. Without it, it's very difficult to know precisely what topics are in the exam and what are not. (Even Sun's syllabus gets it wrong with DataInputStream & DataOutputStream!)
The actual exam was easier than the K&B mock questions. I tried to make sure I averaged two minutes for each question, which worked OK, although I didn't have quite as much time to review my answers as I would have liked. I found the drag and drop questions to be easier than the multiple choice questions, although the downside is the well-known drag and drop "feature" -- you can't review them without resetting your answer. Several of the later questions were on threading; these were more time-consuming because there's more code to read through, and you typically have to think harder to figure out the exact behaviour. Two pieces of API stumped me, but when I checked back in K&B afterwards, it turned out they had been mentioned, so I've got no excuses.
I tried a few sources of mock exam questions, but I'd particularly recommend
Marcus Green's eXamulator, which has some 350 SCJP 5 questions. It's reasonably priced, and I thought the questions were of similar difficulty to the real thing. (Conflict of interest disclaimer: Marcus recently plied me with cocoa, so I have to be nice. Still, I really do believe that if you're wanting to purchase extra mock questions, Marcus's database is the best value for money. YMMV.)
