want to Take SCJD

[amitkumar kamboj]

Actually i pass My SCJP with 65% only with a week preparetion
i m confuse that i should go for SCJD or SCJP again
can any body suggest me what is right to do now

thanks for Suggestion in advance

[Paul Bourdeaux]

Taking the SCJP again to improve your score is fine if you want to do it for personal pride, but a pass is a pass, whether it is 65% or 100%. IMHO certification scores, good or bad, do not belong on a resume anyway (I realize others may disagree. FYI - Yes, I got a good score. No, I do not put it on my resume. )

Taking the SCJD is very much different from the SCJP though. It is not an exam you can cram for. In fact it is really not an exam. If you are looking for a certification you can basically study for and take an exam similar in practice to the SCJP, I would recommend the SCWCD or SCBCD. However, I would recommend more than a week of preparation for either one of them.

If you are interested in application development, and you have the time to put into developing a SCJD project, then by all means go for it. In fact, many people do the SCJD assignment, and then take the SCWCD and SCBCD exams while they wait for their scores to come in.

[Inuka Vincit]

Agreed with paul. SCJP mearly test that you know the java basics. It doesnt test your design and programming skills. You could be a terrible programmer and still get most of the test based certifications. SCJD basically tests you on how well you design and code(not as much as the real world but hey its a certifcation). A weeks perparation you passed SCJP which is quite good, now move on and work on the SCJD, redoing SCJP would be a waste of your money.

[Paul Goh]

My personal opinion is that scjp is child's play compared to scjd. Although I passed scjd, I still cringe when I think about what I have to go through to get it.

[Anton Golovin]

Originally posted by Paul Goh:
My personal opinion is that scjp is child's play compared to scjd. Although I passed scjd, I still cringe when I think about what I have to go through to get it.

I second what Paul has said. SCJP is easy in comparison. I have recently submitted my SCJD, and I have spent 2.5 months coding it. It is not easy, and even though the application sounds relatively simple, it is not simple to implement. It takes persistence and guts to push the project through - but you learn a lot from it.

I worked nights, ate less than usual, forgot about basic things. Then, I was basically running on fumes as I forced to write the necessary documentation, jar it and submit it...

It was the most difficult thing, save for once building the model of U.S. economy in college, that I ever did. The personal responsibility entirely rests on the doer, there is no one to make the decisions and leave the coding to me... it's all my call, so... even though the project is not very difficult, the skills it calls on - programmer, developer, architect to some extent - certainly are taxing.

It's not the 20 hours advertised on the Sun site... more like 200 or 300, or even more.

[ October 07, 2004: Message edited by: Anton Golovin ]
[ October 07, 2004: Message edited by: Anton Golovin ]

[Robert Chisholm]

I go through SCJD every day at work -- except the SCJD cert has better functional requirements and no SA to deal with

IMO the SCJD cert will either indicate that you're a good Java developer or you're not. But it certainly will not make you a Developer when you're done.

Just my 2 cents.

[peter wooster]

Originally posted by Anton Golovin:

I second what Paul has said. SCJP is easy in comparison. I have recently submitted my SCJD, and I have spent 2.5 months coding it. It is not easy, and even though the application sounds relatively simple, it is not simple to implement. It takes persistence and guts to push the project through - but you learn a lot from it.

I worked nights, ate less than usual, forgot about basic things. Then, I was basically running on fumes as I forced to write the necessary documentation, jar it and submit it...

It was the most difficult thing, save for once building the model of U.S. economy in college, that I ever did. The personal responsibility entirely rests on the doer, there is no one to make the decisions and leave the coding to me... it's all my call, so... even though the project is not very difficult, the skills it calls on - programmer, developer, architect to some extent - certainly are taxing.

It's not the 20 hours advertised on the Sun site... more like 200 or 300, or even more.

[ October 07, 2004: Message edited by: Anton Golovin ]

[ October 07, 2004: Message edited by: Anton Golovin ]

Actually as a seasoned developer, I think the SCJD could be done in 20 hours if you code quick, type fast, already know Swing, I/O and RMI and stay away from this forum. If you omit any of those, especially if you come here and start to worry about 44/80 and which pattern is best, you will spend much more time, but will learn much more as well, and probably get a better score in the end.

[Anton Golovin]

Originally posted by peter wooster:


Actually as a seasoned developer, I think the SCJD could be done in 20 hours if you code quick, type fast, already know Swing, I/O and RMI and stay away from this forum. If you omit any of those, especially if you come here and start to worry about 44/80 and which pattern is best, you will spend much more time, but will learn much more as well, and probably get a better score in the end.

Eh, I am not a seasoned developer, Peter. I am a fixture on this forum, so I spend a lot of time here. I also when I started doing the project did not know Swing, RMI, or Threads - I had to learn those things by practice. I do hope I have what it takes to be a good developer. That's for others to judge, of course. I learned, among other things, a great concept of software development while doing the project: just like in politics things need to be delineated from the very start. I could have saved myself many hours if only I planned the whole thing from the start. That takes being a seasoned developer. So what I did is I tried, then I planned, when the shortcomings of my original approach became obvious, and I learned from that.

If I were starting the project from scratch now, I have the requisite know-how, if you will, to know how to plan...

[Sean Gildea]

Great responses.

Persistence is an invaluable characteristic which I think everyone here possesses.

I've only worked one week on the SCJD and I am honestly intregued by the scope of the exam. For everything I have to learn and go thru, I truly hope this certification helps on resumes.

Question: Do you think someone like me, with 1 year of Java programming and hopefully a future SCJD will make a significant jump in salary in my next job? I make 40k right now. ( btw, i have a bachelors comp sci and live in boston area )

[Max Habibi]

Originally posted by peter wooster:


Actually as a seasoned developer,

Actually, as a member of Sun's certification team, the author of a book on the SCJD, and a moderately talented developer( if I do say so myself), I've yet to actually meet the developer who could do the assignment in 20 hours.

By and large, I'd say 3-6 months, assuming 8-10 hours per week, is a good clip. I'd advise anyone who's working on the project to think it through and enjoy the process, and to visit this forum often. There are a lot of really friendly, bright, and talented people here, and if you're into the heavy geek stuff, you'll find a second home here.

Software skills are not a quick meal: even if you have all the ingredients, you still need to let them simmer in sauce for a bit. Walk around and think about the problems: explore, reject, and verify options. This is the fun part of software.

The SCJD is unique in the certification world because it's project based: you're actually expressing yourself through your software. Could you breeze through and eek out a barely passing project? Probably. However, will that have enriched you as a developer? Becaues that's the goal here. Just something to think about.

Best regards,
M

[peter wooster]

Originally posted by Max Habibi:

Actually, as a member of Sun's certification team, the author of a book on the SCJD, and a moderately talented developer( if I do say so myself), I've yet to actually meet the developer who could do the assignment in 20 hours.

By and large, I'd say 3-6 months, assuming 8-10 hours per week, is a good clip. I'd advise anyone who's working on the project to think it through and enjoy the process, and to visit this forum often. There are a lot of really friendly, bright, and talented people here, and if you're into the heavy geek stuff, you'll find a second home here.

Software skills are not a quick meal: even if you have all the ingredients, you still need to let them simmer in sauce for a bit. Walk around and think about the problems: explore, reject, and verify options. This is the fun part of software.

The SCJD is unique in the certification world because it's project based: you're actually expressing yourself through your software. Could you breeze through and eek out a barely passing project? Probably. However, will that have enriched you as a developer? Becaues that's the goal here. Just something to think about.

Best regards,
M

Max, I agree with you 100%, What I was saying was that its possible for someone who already knows it all, types fast and doesn't bother listening to others to do it in 20Hrs. They wouldn't learn much and would probably get a rather poor score.

I am not advocating that approach. So far I've personally spend about 200Hrs on this project, including time on this forum. And I had already used Swing, Sockets, Threads, and JTable in real paid projects before I started.

I'm on my 5th iteration, the first done with Sockets and thin client could have been documented, packaged and submitted after 40Hrs. I might have passed but would not have been satisfied, I would have got a 44/80 on locking as I found a subtle bug a few weeks later. My current version is RMI and rich client, its a lot better but still not ready to submit.

BTW, I've read your book and recommend it and the downloadable sample project to anyone doing this cert.

/pkw

[Sean Gildea]

Max,

while I have you. Is NIO allowed on the SCJD? In your book you devote a chapter to it, however the course listing below says NIO is not usable. Is this a recent change by sun?

http://training.sun.com/US/catalog/courses/CX-310-252A.html

The following APIs and facilities may not be used:

Enterprise JavaBeans
Servlets, JSP technology, or any other web-oriented APIs
NIO, the New IO facilities
Java DataBase Connectivity (JDBC) and SQL

[Max Habibi]

Hi Sean,

Unfortunately, NIO is not allowed on the exam. Ironically, the reasoning is extremely reasonable. Sun doesn't have objective criteria for grading NIO portions of the exam, and they want to be fair to everyone. Accordingly, they are disallowing NIO.

In my opinion, what they're really talking about is non-blocking network code, but technically, FileChannels fall under the NIO umbrella. We included the NIO chapter for completeness. However, the book doesn't require a NIO approach, so there should be plenty of other things that are useful to you.


Peter,

I'm sorry if I seemed harsh or in ill tempered. I misunderstood your post. I don't like the implication that someone who takes longer with the exam is doing something wrong, or failing to enrich themselves. However, you second post makes it clear that this isn't what you meant. I hope you're getting good usage out of the book, and out of javaranch. If you have any suggestions for the second edition, I'd love to hear them.

All best,
M

[peter wooster]

Originally posted by Max Habibi:
... I hope you're getting good usage out of the book, and out of javaranch. If you have any suggestions for the second edition, I'd love to hear them.

All best,
M

I've gotten excellent assistance from your book, in all sorts of areas, such as 1.4 logging and RMI that I wasn't very familiar with. One suggestion for the second edition:
Make finding the sample project easier. If you read through the book you see the site name on page 6, then later you try to find it and the index sends you to page 309 if you look under "sample project", but its not mentioned their. I later found it under Downloads referencing page 316. The first place I looked was in the FAQ under Online Resources, but your publisher's page wasn't there. Once you get to the APress page the index isn't very helpful either, your book is indexed under "The" not under "Sun" or "Java".

[Paul Bourdeaux]

Unfortunately, NIO is not allowed on the exam.

I hate to disagree with the man whose book has kept me sane throughout the SCJD process ... but I have been informed that NIO is acceptable as long as your instructions do not forbid them. Check out this topic for more info.

[Max Habibi]

I disagree with Andrew. I'm also somewhat intimate with how Sun works on these things. If there's any doubt( as there is here), my advice is that you not take chances. But than again, it's just my advice: it's your assignment

M

[Sean Gildea]

Ok, lets say I play it safe and stay away from NIO/fileChannel.

Can I do something like this to extract each field?

 
 
byte[] record = new byte[160];   

for (int bytesRead=1; bytesRead > 0; ) { 

// Reads a byte of data from this file.
int deleted = raf.read(); 
    
// Reads up to b.length bytes of data from
// this file into an array of bytes.
bytesRead = raf.read(record);
  
String s1 = new String(record);
  
String name = new String(s1.substring( 1, 65));
name = name.trim();
System.out.print(name + " "); 
}

[ October 22, 2004: Message edited by: Sean Gildea ]

[Matt Sheehan.]

[Sean Gildea]: Can I do something like this to extract each field?

See my answer to your similar question in this thread.

Matt