Dear Ranchers,
I took my exam today and passed, its amazing, I failed all my mock exams, even the mock I took yesterday ! I only scored 35 correct (pass was 43!). So its a big surprise to me and very good news.
I would like to share my preparation experience with the community, maybe it can give you some ideas.
I have spent 3-months preparing full-time. I know this is quite a long time - but I was starting from a lowish base in that I have never used
Java in great depth before and also I think I could have saved
alot of time as I will mention in my later point.
1. I spent 1-month reading through the K&B. I was aiming to cover 30-pages a day including review sections and self-test. I didn't quite manage this schedule and so I think I took 5 or 6 weeks to go through the book.
2. I then spent 2-weeks re-reading all of the end-of-chapter self-tests again.
3. I took the mock exams in the K&B and reviewed them - 1 week - I failed both of these !
4. I then read some posts here about Whizlabs and looked into this. I decided to buy the product it costs GBP 25 and you can download it directly from the web. I really think its a great tool for helping with the preparation. I would recommend turning-off the timer and to go through all the questions in a
test and then review the answers.
It comes with 7-tests in total, 1- diagnostic test, 5-practice tests and 1 exam test. The questions in all the tests are of a very high standard and perhaps even a bit more difficult then the real exam, but it really covers the complete syllabus and a bit more.
5. I took 4-Whizlab tests, the last one was yesterday and I failed them all ! but I reviewed all my questions and the answers carefully and made notes on Index
cards as recommended in K&B. Slowly I could feel more and more information starting to stick in my mind. I spent on average between 3-4 hours per day studying (occassionally more / some days less) so it was very hard work for quite a while.
6. Because I was failing all my mocks, I decided to save 3 of the exams in Whizlabs until after I took the the exam today. My plan was to take the exam today (expecting to fail) just for the experience, then review the remaining 3 Whizlab exams and then re-sit the exam in 2 weeks time. Because I had a special offer voucher from Sun where I could re-take the exam for free I could think this way. Surprisingly I passed today so that it wont be necessary. I scored 69% and I'm sure if I had done the other practice exams I could have scored even higher, in quite a few topics I was scoring 70-80% unfortunately Concurrency 50% and Scoping 58% pulled me down a bit.
7. My biggest mistake in my preparation was using Eclipse. I read a post here just last week where many people (including Bates) were strongly recommending to prepare without an
IDE, and thats what I should have done from the start. I think I could have picked up and remembered the concepts alot quicker if I had done that. I really think Bates should mention this in the books and also it should be point number 1 in the FAQs etc.
So to summarize the steps,
1. read through K&B and do end of chapter questions (approx. 5-weeks)
2. review all the end of chapter self-test questions again (approx 2-weeks)
3. do K&B mock exams and review (approx 1.5 weeks)
4. buy Whizlabs and do mock exams and review and make notes on Index
cards (2-weeks)
5. DONT USE AN IDE !! I used Textpad for the past week and it really helped alot.
Good luck and thanks for your help here.
Robert.
