Hi All,
Today I cleared SCWCD with 94%. It took over 2 months of preparation time but after getting the score I feel all the effort was worth it.
Considering I am working full time (sometime even weekends) I was able to put in only about 1-2 hours everyday. I took HF mock exam on 30th June and scored 63%. Low score proved to be a catalyst and I increased the studying hours to 4-5 hrs everyday. In fact last 2 days I spent almost 30 hrs studying. I identified my weak areas and concentrated more on them
Here is my SCWCD preparation lifecycle,
1)Head first
Servlets and JSP- read it 2 times and skimmed through it 3rd time. The book covers everything you need to know for the exam. Thanks Brayan, Bert and Kathy for writing such a good book. I tried almost 80% of the book examples on
tomcat which really helped me. Even though I have over 2 years of devt experience, topics like EL, Simple Tags are new to me and with the examples I could get a very good feel of them.
For the benefit all people preparing for the exam I would like to mention that one should definitely go through the book errata for the typo errors and mistakes. Some of these errors can cost you a question on SCWCD
2)J+Web Simulator from Enthuware
Thanks to the creators. The standard of questions is comparable to the real exam. I scored 85, 76, 81, 85, 88, 91, 78 on the seven standard tests. I prepared notes for each question I missed and tried sample codes wherever possible.
Though there are some typo errors and
you should be careful.
3)SCWCD API, Servlets Specification v2.4 Study summary, Web-app configuration files- Frederic Esnault .
Thanks Fredric, your notes rock
4)Design
Patterns � Marc Peabody�s notes.
Thanks Marc.I missed on question on the exam, so am waiting for the free beer.
5)SCWCD 1.4 Study Guide- Mikalai Zaikin
Thanks Mikalai, notes are very helpful.
6)SCWCD Hints
Finally all the efforts have paid off and I have all 3 certifications (
SCJP, SCWCD, and SCBCD- each with a 90+ score) which I had aimed to get sometime in end 2003... Hmm took me 4 years though...
Forgive me for the typos, already finished a pack of beers���.you see I am celebrating