Thanks for ur wishes.
I started preparing for the exam a month ago. To start with I took couple of sample exams to assess my skill level. I found that I was shaky in some of the areas such as DTD, XSL (T & FO), advanced XML Schema, advanced SAX/DOM, APIs of SAX/DOM and XLinks and there was a serious need for improvement. So I started on a reading path by browsing thru the following books:
- XML Bible by Elliotte Rusty Harold (IDG)
- XML Schema by Eric Van Der Vlist (O'Reilly)
- XSLT by Doug Tidwell (O'Reilly)
-
Java and XML (2nd Edition) by Brett McLaughlin (O'Reilly)
- Java Web Services by David A.Chappel and Tyler Jewell
Apart from these books I relied on online tutorials such as the following:
- Tutorials at
www.w3schools.com - XLink tutorial at
http://www.javacommerce.com/tutorial/xml/linking.html - Good article on XLinks at
http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2000/09/xlink/index.html - Another good article on XLinks at
http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/XML/XLinkBasics/print_html - XSL FO tutorial at
http://www.renderx.com/Tests/doc/html/tutorial.html - Another XSL FO tutorial at
http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2001/01/17/xsl-fo/index.html After every preparatory milestone, I took mock exams to diagnose my understanding and skill level. I probably repeated some of the mock exams more than once to assess my understanding of the subjects.
After taking the exam, I am of the opinion that the exam was quite tricky than anticipated. If one really wants to score more, one must really dig down each subject in detail particularly paying more attention to the following areas:
- XML Schema in the areas of ID/IDREF, derivations of simple types, derivations of complex types, exact possibilities with each derivation,
pattern facet and regular expressions, scenarios where Schema is a better choice than DTD
- Good understanding of structuring data in a modular fashion
- XSL in the areas of evaluation of XPath expressions
- DTD in the areas of both general Entities and Parameter Entities, Internal sub set vs external sub set, scenarios of using internal sub set
- SAX and DOM APIs
-
SOAP structure, scenarios of using UDDI
- Good understanding of XLinks, XPath, XPointers, XSL-FO
- Overall understanding of how to fit these technologies together to provide an efficient solution from design and architecture point of view
I really did not finalize the date of exam until I started scoring more than 85% in all the mock exams consistently. I also took the IBM sample
test provided by Prometric by paying 10 bucs and my score was 93.5%. I got a free voucher but unfortunately by that time I already payed for the exam. I am not sure if I can get my money back. (Hey I can use $150 for some other cool stuff, u know!!)
I can share more info but it will too much for this post I guess, but I am willing to answer any other queries!!
Wish you best of luck!!
Thanks
Murali