hi everyone,
i passed
scjp exam just yesterday with 92 % and thought would share some of my experiences.
I started studying from the exam point of view 2-3 months back, studied few chapters from RHE for 5-10 days and then started reading again just 4-5 days before the exam. I had gone through a few mock tests and in it they asked for constructors of List, Choice etc, methods of File class like File.listRoots etc. As a result I studied and tried remembering the method calls, constructor signature etc for various classes.
However nothing of this sort was asked in the exam.
So its better just to concentrate on the fundamentals, and just have an overview of the classes and their methods except for explicity mentioned ones like Math class or
String, StringBuffer etc classes.
I got one question on MediaTracker class and that too on waitForID method and blocking concept. It seems others have as well got questions on MediaTracker on this aspect only.
On sockets I got one question regarding how to use it to read from a socket. So one need not know about it in deep except reading and writing to and from sockets.
Got a few questions on java.io class.
On layout I got 3-4 questions covering Flow, Border and GridBag layouts.
I think I erred in the GridBagLayout question. I was just going through the earlier messages on javaranch yesterday and saw that question had come up in one of the threads, although not specified directly. It was about anchor and fill fields of GridBagLayout. I also came across a question on
Thread, which as well I think I missed out on in the exam, in the javaranch thread but referred to in a veiled manner as in "that famous Thread question on suspension.......". I kicked myself on seeing that and wished I had checked the past threads over here.
Moral, do go through the old threads over here before going for the exam.
There was just one question on collections. It was about choosing one of the various classes/interfaces given particular criteria.
I think, about other breakups there was already a thread which mentioned it, so wouldn't go through it.
So to someone preparing for the exam
1. Just prepare for the fundamentals
2. Do go through some of the mock tests(a few of the questions were almost the same) but don't rely on them for the areas to cover for the exam.
3. Do go through the old threads over here.
I have been an intermittent visitor to this site. However it did help me in picking up various important points useful in the exam. Hence would thank all the moderators and participants over here.
It is a great site for people preparing for the certification exam and I hope the best for others appearing for the exam.
