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Passed 141 with 74%

 
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Dear Friends,
I passed the exam this morning. First of all, i should attribute my success totally to being a part of this forum. I learnt a lot from discussions here.
Difficulty of the exam -
I wouldn't say the exam was easy, but definitely not difficult. In my assessment, the IBM sample mock exam(which has 44 questions) difficulty is only around 5 when compared to the real one on a scale of 1-10. Time was not a factor at all. I took all the time in the world to answer the scenario, and xlst/schema code snippets. I was still left with 3 minutes by the end. My procedure was to mark the question right for the first time itself.
Coming to the exam content, there were lot of SCHEMA, XSLT questions (big code snippets). They are simple once we read them carefully. There are around 6-8 business scenario questions. I scenario question got exactly repeated from the IBM's mock test. There were around 2 questions on XSLFO and around 3 covering SOAP, UUDI and XLink. There were around 5-6 questions on DOM/SAX.
My Preparation -
I've been preparing for this exam for the past 6 months, but mainly in bits and pieces w.r.t continuity. If i take the average time, it would be around 1-1.5 hours of preparation per day. I have to concentrate on my work project parallely and that is in Solid Modelling (not any of the internet stuff).
I took a calculated risk by knowing only briefly about XLink, XPointer, XSLFO, SOAP, WSDL, UUDI. There were some related questions in the exam as i already mentioned and i'm not sure as to what i marked were correct or not. I think if we are thorough in Basic XML syntax, DTD/Schema, DOM/SAX, XSLT and with some brief knowledge of XLink, XPointer, XSLFO, SOAP, WSDL, UUDI, we should be able to get through the exam.
Books and resources -
I've purchased Prof.XML1 (that was by mistake) and XSLT (OReilly). I hardly read them.
I totally depended on the following resources -
1) XSLT - Zvon's example-based tutorial
http://zvon.org/xxl/XSLTutorial/Output/contents.html
http://www.perfectxml.com/TipsXSLT.asp
XPath's OReilly (the link to which was given by Dan in one of his previous posts)
2) XML Schemas - Roger's tutorials(2 ppt files) are the best in my view. We have to practice them thorougly with examples.
3) DOM/SAX - The following thing contains the interface information. I got some tutorials giving how to use these api and practice them a lot in JAXP. That is the only way of remembering what each interface does and that kind of things.
http://java.sun.com/xml/jaxp/dist/1.1/docs/api/org/w3c/dom/package-summary.html
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.1/docs/api/org/xml/sax/package-summary.html
4) Last but not the least, the MOST important thing is to practice the concepts and discuss with people on the forum if we have any doubts in mind.
Mock Exams -
IBM's sample test, skillometer test, whizlabs' free sample test, witscale's test and all the mock exams available on JavaRanch.
The following is an analysis of how i did in my score report -
Section % of Test Your Score

1. Architecture 18% 80%
2. Information Modelling 27% 80%
3. XML Processing 33% 83%
4. XML Rendering 11% 50%
5. Testing and Tuning 11% 50%

I would thank all the people who helped me with their discussions.
Regards,
Jayadev.
 
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You did it!..
Congrats my friend!.
Have a nice week!.
Regards
Balaji
 
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