Hi,
I cleared the exam on Sunday morning with 70% marks . I am a silent member of this forum for last 1 month. Thanks to all the members for their excellent tips. Special thanks to Jayadev Pulaparty and Greg Merrill for their excellent postings. Even though I was not actively participating don�t want to leave without sharing my experiences.
Background in XML:
Working on web based projects since last 4 years. Learned XML from
www.w3schools.com last year to have a knowledge. Not using right now in any of my projects.
Motivation:
Update myself with the latest upcoming Technologies.
Got a free voucher from IBM.
Target: My target was 80%.
Preparation tools:
100% web based preparation + XML@whizlab
https://coderanch.com/forums http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xml-cert/ Preparation time: 4 Weeks on and off.
Review:
I can�t say the exam was easy or tough as it varies from person to person. It wasn�t that easy as mentioned by some people as well as not that difficult as mentioned by others. I was able to complete all 55 questions in 90 minutes. Could revise only first 19 question. I used mainly the elimination process for answering the questions. The questions that were taking more than 2 minutes I marked then and jumped to the next question.
The scenario questions were not that long. Some schema questions and identify valid XML were long and tricky. DOM was unto API level and I lost some marks there. One question was about �Coercion� in Namespace and one from Schema Extention. About 2 questions were including XQuery.
Tips for preparation:
In one of the earlier postings someone mentioned that there is no need to buy any books so I decided to make it 100% web based.
Here is the Topic wise list that I used for preparation. (Use this list at your own risk based on your Motivation, Target and background).
Exam Info
http://www-1.ibm.com/certify/tests/obj141.shtml http://www.perfectxml.com/IBMXMLCertification.asp#ref 1. XML/DTD basics:
www.w3schools.com I started with w3schools and covered XHTML, XML, XSL, DTD, Schema,
SOAP and WSDL in the first pass.
The next wonderful complete and concise link is
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/98/10/guide0.html Test will cover a significant amount of XML/DTD syntax, so carefully study this article, following the links to the W3C recommendations when appropriate. This link is really good to start with if you are new to XML. Though some topics doesn�t make any sense in the first read.
2. XSL and XMLSchema:
Get Roger Costello's tutorial for XSLT and Schema from
http://www.xfront.com. It is the best available on the web. Do them completely you will get a good confidence of these topics. Go through readme file to get the
XSL Processors
XALAN from Apache (
http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/)
XT from James Clark (
http://www.jclark.com) or
SAXON from Michael Kay (
http://users.iclway.co.uk/mhkay/saxon/instant.html)
Schema validators
xerces from Apache
xsv from Henry Thompson (
ftp://ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/pub/XSV/XSV12.EXE)
If you download XML project from this site it gives you all the processors and validators.
3. DOM - Very Important. Dom core is a collection of Interface specification
A must read for DOM are
http://www-105.ibm.com/developerworks/education.nsf/dw/xml-onlinecourse-bynewest?OpenDocument&Count=500 Search for DOM tutorial at this link. Actually you will get DOM, SAX and XSL-FO tutorials here. The XSL-FO tutorial is a wonderful and is more than enough to go through.
This stuff doesn�t cover some of the stuff like NodeFilters, TreeWalker, DOM Event Listener model etc.
A posting by �Jayadev Pulaparty� is a must read for DOM
https://coderanch.com/t/146641/po/certification/over-DOM Link to the DOM API lies here:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.1/docs/guide/plugin/dom/org/w3c/dom/package-summary.html 4. SAX
A must read for SAX are
http://www-105.ibm.com/developerworks/education.nsf/dw/xml-onlinecourse-bynewest?OpenDocument&Count=500 Search for SAX tutorial at this link. It�s more than enough.
SAX API:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.1/docs/api/org/xml/sax/package-summary.html 5. NAMESPACE
When you will do the Schema tutorial from
http://www.xfront.com you will have a good knowledge of NAMESPACE.
The other must to resource is
http://www.zvon.org/xxl/NamespaceTutorial/Output/index.html You can have a look at
http://www.brics.dk/~amoeller/XML/namespaces.html also.
6. Xpath, XLink, Xpointer, CSS and CSS2
The best place to look for the is:
http://www.zvon.org/index.php?nav_id=tutorials&mime=html_gr 7. Xquery
Check this link for Xquery
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/10/16/xquery.html this should be more than enough to have a feel of it.
8. XML Security (Just an Idea)
http://www.perfectxml.com/Syngress/XMLDigitalSignature/default.asp . No need to read the entire article.
If you are still hungry look at
http://www.perfectxml.com/FreeLibrary.asp to get a list of free chapters available.
Sorry can�t give reviews about any books as haven�t used any.
Free Mock Exams �
I will recommend only
1.IBM website has a sample mock exam given here
http://certify.torolab.ibm.com/icetest.jsp 2.
http://www.witscale.com/index.html 3.XML and XSLT Quiz from
http://www.perfectxml.com/TestQuiz.asp 4.
http://www.skillometer.com 5.Personally will not recommend
http://www.javaranch.com/xml/XMLexamList.jsp as some of questions have wrong answers.
XML@whizlabs was helpful in understanding scenario-based questions. For concepts it�s really at tougher level.
Last minute tips links:
http://www.certificationguru.com/xmltutorial/index.html (Doesn�t seem to work right now)
http://www.javaprepare.com/xml/notes/intro.html (Good One)
Other excellent links
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xml-cert/message/181 https://coderanch.com/t/146840/po/certification/Passed http://mywebpages.comcast.net/spetrova4/xmlcert_ibmexam.html http://viktor99.virtualave.net/IBM141a.html http://viktor99.virtualave.net/IBM140a.html If you still have any other questions do let me know �
Vijay Singh Rathore�
SCJP,
SCJD, IBM UML, IBM XML.
Pessimism Sometimes helps me to prepare for the worst.
