Well, first of all I would like to thank all the guys at JavaRanch (Madhav, Faiza, Manjunath and so many others) who helped me in many different ways in preparing for this exam. It was a constant learning process going thru the various posts, asking questions and answering whatever I could. I didnt know about this site when I appeared for
SCJP late last year.
I began my preparation last month around this time. Spent about 100 hours or so. I do have couple of years experience in
java and about one year in server side java programming. I referred Core
Servlets and JavaServer Pages,
JSP and Servlet Specs (liked Servlet specs more...), Vel's, Miftah Khan's and Zen's notes (All of them are really good). Thanks to them for providing us such good notes
I would recommend going thru the Servlets and JSP API.
A must is installation of a server (
Tomcat is good for learning purpose) and trying out lots and lots of code. As they say, coding is the best way to learn. Every new concept is worth implementing thru a small program. This process is much more helpful than trying to memorize all the dtd and api...
Reg the exam, I finished first round in 40 mins and spent the next 20 mins to verify all the marked questions. Time is not a problem in this exam. There's plenty of it...
There were questions in design pattern which had bimodal data access, Session Entity Facade etc as choices. So I would think its a good thing to go thru all the popular patterns.
And yeah, I did hget a survey of 9 questions in the beginning. I am not sure if they affedted the questions I got.
For me, 90s have been elusive. I missed it by a whisker in SCJP and here again... Oh well... I am deciding between Architect and Developer exam, and it would be great if I can get the good company of all of u in those exams too. Many thanks to all of you and best of luck for ur exams. I will definitely hang in here and help everyone I can.