Took the
test last Friday. I have no background in professional
Java programming. Resources I studied were RHE, Exam Cram, and Mughal and Rasmussen. Also read some of the posts at the Javaranch over the last couple of weeks. Javaranch has been a tremendous help in learning Java, even though most of the questions posted are more difficult and detailed than anything that came up in my exam.
I took Bill Brogden's Hardest Questions Test and got around 60%. Also took the three mock exams by Marcus Green and scored 75% to 80% on each. Those are the only mock exams I took.
The level of the exam was about the same as the end of chapter questions in RHE. In fact, a couple of the questions from RHE actually appeared in the exam, as did a couple questions from Marcus Green's mock exams. I felt the exam was easier overall than Marcus Green's mocks, since the mocks contain some intentional trick questions whereas the real exam was more straightforward. Still had to read each question carefully, though.
About 40% of the questions required examining class definitions and code, 60% were conceptual questions on policy and practices.
The test was mostly on basic concepts - with a couple of exceptions, it didn't focus on APIs and detailed coding syntax.
I finished the exam in about an hour, then spent the next 40 minutes going over all my answers, though I don't think I changed any.
Got 4 fill in the blank questions, the rest were divided evenly between multiple choice and single choice.
2 on I/O, one easy, one on setting up to read from a socket that I had no clue on
3-4 on Events
2-3 on Exceptions
Several each on inheritance, overloading, and overriding
2 on layout managers, including one on GridBagLayout. Had to know all the properties of the GridBagConstraints object and how they interrelate
1 on immutability of Strings - thanks partly to Javaranch, I remembered that concat and similar methods return new Strings, they don't modify the original
MediaTracker appeared once, in an answer to a multiple choice question - a post by Ajith Kallambella on July 26 was extremely helpful and appreciated and I hope no one is offended if I excerpt it here:
"You will only need to know waitForID will block the calling
thread until the method returns. Typically this shows up as a choice in questions involving transition of thread states."
Good luck.
