Hello Ranchers,
I passed part I of the exam yesterday with
95%. I am happy with the score given that I studied for a month and that too intermittently although I have been working as an Architect for a couple of years now.
I used Paul Allens book, but thought the book was not very well structured and hence I used the book only to get a high level understanding of the areas involved in the exam.
I used the following books for the preparation -
1. UML Distilled - Martin Fowler (this one is a gem)
2. GoF Design
Patterns ( i found the samples in C++ a bit difficult to understand)
3. Head First Design Patterns - (to understand the implementation in
Java and cover for the understanding problems I had with the GoF book)
4. Mastering
EJB - Ed Romans
These are some of the links that I found helpful apart from the ones in the LINKS section of the forum-
Load Balancing -
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2001/09/26/load.html Firewalls -
http://www.vicomsoft.com/knowledge/reference/firewalls1.html In hindsight, I think the Whizlabs Mock Tests were very helpful in understanding the format and quantifying ones preparedness for the exam. It was worth the investment. I remember having asked a question on the difficulty level of the actual exam with the Whizlabs exams (for which i never received a satisfactory answer), but having gone through the actual exam I can say that the real exam is much simpler than the Whizlabs suite. I used to score around 80's in the Whizlabs.
Contrary to some of the posts I had more than enough time to complete the
test. I completed the test and the review with 30 minutes to spare.
Many thanks to the Java Ranchers for creating a wealth of information on this site.
I have a couple of question on how to proceed further -
1. I am not able to log on to the sun site (www.certmanager.net/sun) to view the exam report. It says that the "We could not find a user meeting the specified criteria". However, I could see the report on the Prometric site. Any ideas on what could be the problem?
2. Can anyone provide pointers on how to procure the assignment in Pune/Mumbai region in India? I have been trying to get this information from the Prometric centers here but the information that has come by hasnt been very encouraging.
Many thanks,
Ashutosh