Preparation time

[Daniele Falloni]

Hello Ranchers,

I planned to start studying for this certification in January (with SCEA but in low priority)
so I'm going to buy and refers to these books:

XML in a Nutshell 3ed
XSL Cookbook 2ed

and
XML bible is useless if I use XML in a Nutshell?

Are they enough? they cover all topics needed for the cert?

And the last question :
I have more than 2 years of experience in XML,XSL and XPath but I�m not a �Guru� simply I used to resolve normal day-work problems with sometime hard work with recursive Xpath and xsl functions.
So..
I want ask how is really tricky the exam? And how much time I need to be ready on it ?

Thanks!

[Ernesto Elias-Nieland]

Hi Daniele!

It took me about 4 weeks to prepare, but I think you can prepare much quicker for it when you are just studying for the exam. I also bought these two books but actually I just used XML in a Nutshell for preparation. The XSLT cookbook goes to much into detail.
The questions were mainly about simple XSLT or Schema stuff and design questions about how or why you should use the tested technologies. So no realy tricky questions like in the SCJP exam.
I think that learning the topics mentioned in the objective is all you have to know. I did not encounter a question that was not related to an objective.
In generell I think the exam is difficult because of the large nummber of technologies that are tested and not because of the complexity of the questions.

Bye,
Ernie

[Daniele Falloni]

Thanks Ernie!!

with your helpful infos I'll not buy XSL cookbook for now.
I will refer to w3school and XSL specifications and if they are not enoght
I will go in library to check if really I need it.

Thanks a lot!

Daniele