Hi All,
Passed part 1 today. Details:
Total: 95%
Breakup:
Legacy Connectivity : 80%
Security : 50%
Rest : 100%
Firstly, thanks to whoever started this forum!!! and then, thanks to you ranchers for posting the valuable discussions...the discussions helped me surely during my preparations...
Let me share some information for those who are planning to take part 1:
I didn't get any time to review the answers
(!!!)...yes, even I was scared a bit during the
test when I realized I am not going to get time for review...but I followed the stratgy of reviewing each answer at least twice immediately after answering it (I answered my last question in this way when there were 2-3 minutes left from time.)
1) I did not have any real world experience of working with EJBs, JMS. Also, did not get a chance to use other concepts (security, design
patterns) extensively...hence had to prepare for long(ggg) time...long(ggg) time = 4 weeks time off from work + some hours on weekends...had to grasp
EJB concepts starting from 0, and thanks to the EJB 1.1 book from Monson-Haefel (O'reilly)- I managed to understand the EJB world...did 2 to 3 revisions of this book (page by page).
2) Other books/notes referred:
-Design Patterns:GoF
-Mark Cade's book
-UML Distilled
-Jamie Jaworski's book for legacy connectivity, security
-Ramu Meda's notes on common architecture from one the
SCEA yahoo groups
-2nd chapter of UML User Guide.
-JMS by Monson-Haefel (O'reilly)
-Internationalization tutorial from Sun
3)Mock tests-
Whizlabs + other online mocks listed in this forum in various posts...
About Whizlabs: After reading some negative reviews about quality of Whizlabs mocks, I was confused whether to go for it or not...finally, got it 1.5 week before exam date...and here are some comments from me about Whizlab mocks-
-some questions were too ambiguous to even understand the meaning of the question...
-some answers were conflicting with information available in other online resources / some answers had no reasoning.
-some questions were on EJB 2.0 and J2EE design patterns with a note stating:"This question is applicable for EJB 2.0 version of SCEA". No explanation from Whizlab so far on why they included these in current mocks when the real test doesn't yet cover EJB 2.0 and J2EE Design Patterns.
Well, these things somewhat scared me- especially given that I came across them just 6-7 days prior to exam day...
Given all this, still Whizlabs surely helped me feel bit confident by practicing a lot and get a feel of the real exam. Especially, when it came to handling those tricky ones...some of the questions and Whizlabs notes were really good to enhance understanding of the topic...
4) (I hope you're not tired of reading yet...so some more). A suggestion: Try to understand the concepts from books and other online resources as much as you can, rather than concentrating on mocks. But yes, practice as much as you can with mocks when you feel you have understood the concepts enough to try your knowledge to answer questions based on them.
5) All the best to all those who are going for part 1 (and 2 and 3)!!!
Have a good one.
Darshan.
