I have been logging to this forum regularly for a very long time and I wanted to share some opinions, but I was waiting till i take the exam and finally i did and scored 72%, I am a little disappointed with the score.
I scored 65% on the Head first mock exam, and i got about 90% on the mock exam on the javaranch website, the javaranch mock exam is too easy and the real exam is mucher tougher.
I have been willing to take this exam since july 2005, but I couldnt take it because my studing rate is too slow so by the time i reach the end of the book I forget the beginning and
ALOT memorization is required.
I have been doing web development for a while and it's the reason why I thought taking the exam based on hands on experience is going to be easy, then I realised that many of the topics you will never get exposed to, example memorizing deployment descriptors, plus the exam is too low level in the web technology, ppl are talking about
JSF,ADF,
Struts and the exam is still doing specific calls to get request parameters. I find
SCJP alot useful, more practical and most important of all based on understanding, rather than SCWCD.
I would really like to thank HF writers for this piece of art, it's one of the best books i've read, and makes very dull topics fun to read. It's very helpful.
I strongly recommend you use another reference for the design
patterns and EL, as alot playing with words is used to confuse you, they seemed simple and straight forward to me but thats where i scored least.
I couldnt stress on one topic more than the other, all the topics where there, i couldnt think of something that wasnt in the exam, memorize everything, all the details all objects all the methods. You have to burn in all the details, I've read HeadFirat once and read other web books including those are NOT written for the certification, I thnk if you read HF twice or as many times to get in all the details hopefully you will get a high score.
Finally i guess these were my thoughts rather than my experience and I am sorry that most of them are negative, my next step is SCBCD(EJB3) and if anyone thinks it's all about memrization SCWCD style please let me know.
Thanks