Well thats a difficult question to answer ..I was planning to appear for the exam for quite some time .. each time I started something happened and I stopped ..and again after some time (6 months to 1yr) I again started ...planning to appear for SCEA was like quitting smoking for a chain smoker for me
The best head start I got when I was told to conduct a training on design patterns in my company..and in that training there were some peers who were genuine critics...I prepared some slides covering the 23 patterns and wrote programs for each .. then I felt like yes!!! now I should seriously start the preperation...
Then from some unknown source I got the PDF of Mark Cade and Simon roberts .. and the one from Paul Allen and Joe Bambara ...Pagewise Bambara is huge and initially it looked like its a good book !!! but somehow it threw me off and I stuck to Mark Cade ...the best thing about cade is that ..it does not blab a lot (unlike me
) ...
Form some other source I got the 288 questions ..(Exerfosys, whizlabs all of them have these questions... there are several links that has the same set one of them is
(
http://www.geekinterview.com/question_details/5891)
It claims that it has some 400 plus questions but really speaking some of them are programming based ..in SCEA there is not programming questions !!
I call Architects as DIBOB(Drawing intelligent boxes on the board) ..so UML is important .. UML was not difficult since I am working with case tools since 1999..(Rational being one ) ..but the thing that stumped me was
1. Protocol
2. Legacy Connectivity
3. Security
4. Applicability
For a couple of years I have been working as a designer/analyst ..and you must be knowing that in normal Indian software companies ..if you say to your boss that you want to be an architect ..they will say what!!! you dumb sucker ..do as what your clients say
...
so it was difficult for a person of mediocre calibre like me to start gathering stuffs... the first step was to understand the 288 questions rather than roting it ..the first thing that hit me was active and passive replication ...so I decided take a topic and read about it and discuss it with client architects when ever you get a free time (a smoke or tea or may be in the middle of a project discussion ..).Fortunately I have seen that good architects have a very good 15000 feet view ... Why I say it 15000 is that they can explain things to a programmer very easily and clearly ... and when you tell them patterns they love it ...
So for some months my motto was .. a topic a day .. keeps my sadness away .. I put up the syllabus in a board in front of my office pc ...and whenever found time ...took the topic and read it ...or if I found any architect available ..ask him a question or two over the IM.
As a result ..I became an avid googler on the topics (I still made that 288 questions base) ...then I got whizlabs ... whizlabs is good .. its ambiguous but good ... makes you frustrated with its wrong answers ...but makes you think ...
Also it has a good UI and 9 total tests .. which is of similar difficulty level as the actual exam..
There were also some mock tests available ...one of them has similar questions as whizlabs .. but their
applet exhibits does not work ...so I would recommend whizlabs for preperation ... but only take whizlabs 1-11/2 months before the actual
test.
Before that ...study cade ...monsoon haefel(I studied it a while back since I am working in J2EE from some years ..and at that time my seniors told me to study Monsoon Haefel ...and not ED Roman ... but if somebody is starting I would recommend ED Roman first and then monsoon haefel..but also the best thing is actually to play around with EJB for a while ...only theory does not give confidence....
There is also an IBM white paper on SCEA which is very good...gives a concise idea... veena madhukar also gave some very good links ..which you can also see ...
but the most important thing which I feel is the ones which I mentioned above ...we all work with EJB/JMS/JSP/Servlets ..but very few work with the three I mentioned ...particularly JAVA-IDL/RMI-IIOP/RMI-JRMP/CORBA/JNI needs to be properly understood with respect to J2EE.Also connectivity can be an issue .. but I have found that there are a couple of terms which are important
1. Offboard server
2. Reverse proxy load balancing
3. HTTP Tunneling
4. Active and passive replication
5. DMZ
6. Applet restrictions
we need to undertand this ..since these areas are SCEA favourite spots
..other than this do a bit of ranching ...lot of people give a lot of links ..all of them are really good .. but I would recommend to start with the 288 and get along with it !!!
--Cheers