Passed yesterday....

[Stephen Cowell]

I managed to pass the scwcd exam yesterday. I seem to be strangely drawn to a score of 84%, having scored that in SCJP and now in SCWCD.
Briefly my experiences in preparing for and sitting this exam were
1) Tomcat was a little confusing to set up. I started following a set of instructions that I latter realised were for installing Tomcat as a plug in to Apache, rather than installing Tomcat as a stand alone server. Installing it as a stand alone server proved much easier, so I now have Apache running on port 80 and Tomcat on port 8180.
2) I bought only 1 book to study from, "More Servlets and Java Server Pages" by Marty Hall. I found the book excellent, although a few of the chapters can be skipped as they fall outside the objectives (eg the one on filters and the final chapter). I also read the servlet API & half of the JSP API. The JSP API is a real slog.
3) In a pinch, if money is a real issue, to prepare for this exam you could probably get away with not buying any books. Instead read the online "Core Servlets and Java Server Pages", the Sun servlet and JSP APIs (to understand the newer version of JSP & servlets) and the various other online notes and tutorials.
4) I bought the JWebPlus mock test and found it to be inferior to their excellent JQ+ (which I bought last year in the lead up to my SCJP exam). Reasons I disliked it were
a) it's way too expensive
b) it has very poor spelling and grammar. At least a third to a half of the questions have a spelling mistake or poor grammar making the question ambiguous or hard to understand. Surely if the authors of the questions don't have English as their first language they could employ a proof reader to correct their mistakes.
c) some of the questions test SCJP objectives instead of SCWCD
d) it had only 5 tests, instead of the 9 or so that JQ+ had
5) The SCWCD exam itself seemed to start off with very easy questions for the first two thirds before the questions become very tough for the last 15 or so. My impression is that it is an easy test to pass with minimal effort as there are enough easy questions in the exam. However it is tough to get a 90+% score unless a lot of study is done.
6) My own preparation effort was about 3 hours a day for 2 weeks.
Steve.

[Ian B Anderson]

Congratulations,
What exam are you going to take next?
Ian

[Vikrama Sanjeeva]

Gr888 job Stephen!!.How u compare WCD with JCP?
Bye.
Viki.
SCJP2

[Raj Kumar]

Congrats Stephen! Wish u the very best

[Stephen Cowell]

Originally posted by Vikrama Sanjeeva:
Gr888 job Stephen!!.How u compare WCD with JCP?
Bye.
Viki.
SCJP2

SCJP is harder. I had to prepare two or three times longer for SCJP than for SCWCD, and got the same score in both.
[ February 21, 2002: Message edited by: Stephen Cowell ]

[Madhav Lakkapragada]

Congrats.
- satya

[Vamsidhar Chenepalli]

Congrats.. Good score..

[Hema Menon]

Congratulations!
Hema

[Srini Admala]

Congratulations !

-Srini

[Cindy Mokrane]

Congratulations

2) I bought only 1 book to study from, "More Servlets and Java Server Pages" by Marty Hall. I found the book excellent, although a few of the chapters can be skipped as they fall outside the objectives (eg the one on filters and the final chapter). I also read the servlet API & half of the JSP API. The JSP API is a real slog.

so you mean that filtering is not part of SCWCD, to be or not to be?

Cindy

[Stephen Cowell]

Originally posted by Ian B Anderson:
Congratulations,
What exam are you going to take next?
Ian

I'm changing my mind every day. Today its IBM OOAD, yesterday it was SCEA, day before it was SCJD. I don't currently work with Java although I have 12 years IT experience in (mumble) cobol. So I'm trying to figure out what might be best to get my foot in the door as a Java developer. Tough choice.
Steve.

[Stephen Cowell]

Originally posted by Cindy Mokrane:
Congratulations

so you mean that filtering is not part of SCWCD, to be or not to be?

Cindy

Cindy, I know, I was suprised too since filtering is a major new feature of the 2.3 spec. However have a read of the objectives for SCWCD and you wont see a word on filtering.
SteveC.

[Ashik Uzzaman]

Congrats Stephan, good job done! And good feedback...
Next plan?

[Axel Janssen]

congrats.

Axel

[Ajith Kallambella]

Congratulations Stephen!

[Paul Anilprem]

Congratulations for your success, Stephen. We are very sorry to hear that JWebPlus was not very helpful to you.
We do want to fix the grammatical errors and for this purposes, we have decided to invite somebody from JavaRanch. Since there are so many experienced and enthusiatic people here, I believe this would be the best place to ask help for
If anybody is interested in reviewing the question bank, please contact me at [e-mail] . Also, please mention the compensation that you would expect for this. Please keep in mind that we are not a big company (yet, that is ).

[Jim Bertorelli]

Congratulations! Good job indeed.
Paul, How about a dollar a question? I have not taken the test yet and I haven't bought your software either. So this would be good for both of us. What do you say?

[Pankaj Bhatia]

Congrats Stephen,
I also wanted to give this exam. Can you tell me from where to start.