Hi,
today I passed the IBM 141
Test with 70%.
A big and warm thank you to all contributers to this discussion board. The information here was a great help - without I surely could not have passed.
Well, guess I got the central Europe version of the test. I got some questions about topics nobody else mentioned before and some topics mentioned didn't appear in my test:
- DOM: one question asked about some of the DOM Events methods.
- XML Schema: two qestions on Regular Expressions; but just the very basics like a special value would fit in an expression like this [A-Z]{3}[0-9]{2}.
- EBusiness: one question about some ebusiness terms (maybe I should have read the chapters 25 and 26 of Prof. XML 2nd edition)
- Namespace: A question aksed about namespace coercion...
- XML Schema: Nothing about Namespace handling in import or include, nothing about keys.
-
SOAP: A question about SOAP encoding and SOAP extension (guess I lost this point)
- XSLT: no namespace, no keys
- CSS: nothing
- XML Security: One question about if Integrity and some other topic are part of XML Security
I had 24 seconds left after answering the last question... So I just sat there whatching the last seconds passing by.
- The style of the questions I found pretty similar to the 141 sample test. I noticed that reading through all the 'exhibit button' text isn't allways necessary. It saved some time to read the question and all the possible answers first - and just in case go through the long 'exhibits button' text...
For preparation I used Prof. XML 2nd (worth reading are the chapters 2!, 3!, 4, 5!, 6, 8, 10, 11!, 12!, 20), XML Schemas (worth reading art the chapters 1!, 2!, 3!, 4!, 6! and parts of 7, 8 and 9), O'Reillys XSLT complete (don't worry - half of the book is just numb code you don't have to care about), XML Bible (worth reading are chapters on Entity and Notations 10!, 11!, 12! and on XSL-FO, XLink and XPointers 18!, 19!, 20), the DOM2 Core Spec (I colour-printed it, found this much better to consume than the overview in Prof XML 2nd).
(don't miss to read the ! marked chapters - guess it should not be a problem to skipp the chapters I left out; so all in all its a big stash of paper on your desk - but 60% you can skip).
Besides the books I can recommend the following web resources:
- JavaRanch - this disussion forum and all the valuable comments of people which have taken the 141 test already - thank you William Li, Menon Hema, Viktor Stepanchuk, Vani Kadur, Niharika Srivastav, Mapraputa Is, Mamta Swain, Frank Lin)
- XML, XSLT, XPath Syntax
Cards from Mulberry (thanks for this folks...)
- WebServices: the overview articles from Sun at
http://dcb.sun.com/practices/webservices/ and as an nice intro
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-01-2002/jw-0125-webservices.html and the SOAP Tutorial on
http://www.w3schools.com/ - the XPath and XSLT Tutorial on Zvon.org
http://www.zvon.org/index.php?nav_id=tutorials&mime=html - XML Security:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/xmlsecuritysuite/ - The IBM sample test 140 and 141
XML@Whiz - very nice to have this program. Thanks! Hope that in a near future release they will review all the questions and answers and get rid of some real bad mistakes. Be a bit critical about the answers. - One more tip: I copy-pasted all questions I had trouble with in a text editor and printed them...
Well, I feel happy that I made it. 70% is pretty close to the passing score which the test program says is 65% (not 66%) - lucky boy I am. XML was a pretty new topic for me - I studied for about 9 weeks - minus 3 weeks collection practical experience with XML, DTD, XML Schema and XSLT on this multi-language project (
http://art.cappuccinonet.com).
Good luck for all of you still preparing for the test. Eesha Ali - best whishes especially to you... never give up...
Regards
Berny
