Hi everybody,
Yest I got my
Java certification. Well , passed with 81%, prob not all that good score compared to many of u here. Eventhough I never actively participated in the discussions, I have always been a quiet follower of the forum and each time it did made me realise how much more I needed to learn. So I owe a thanks to you all folks.
As for the exam, I would say majority of the questions were easy. Probably it is those 25%-30% tough/hard or those that really make u wonder which one could be right, which makes this certification a challenge. Most of the mock exams are so tough I feel it sometimes lets u down on the areas that u need to concentrate for the actual exam. So if u ask for my experience, let me first tell u about the exam :
*There were initially 2 ques regarding Sun marketing etc. Of course I aswered positively as the time started clicking.
* There were lots on fundamentals - ie operators, identifiers, shifting, loops constructs etc.
These were sort of similar to the ones in the mock exams
*There were a 2-3 on encapsulation , where a descr of the design is given and u are asked how to specify the class declaration or its members. ie 'is a', 'has a' questions.
This I feel the Sun sample or RHE book gives good guidance. But beware, they make u think there!!!
* Overloading, overridiing constructors-There were lots of codes to be analysed
*4-5 questions on modifiers including type in, choosing from radio/checkbox(with theoritcal/sentence ), program code situations.
*3-4 on exception handling. (Mock exams make u master these, so don't worry !!)
*3-4 on java.lang - strings & wrappers - quite easy if u know equals and ==
*2/3 on collections - very basic
*2 on I/O again Okay
*4-6 on layouts and awt etc.
* 2 on GC - one theory
* 4 on threads - 3 were theory and it was really hard to choose esp for a person like me whose is weak on threads.
I got 5 type in ques and before the exam I was quite concerned about the way to go about answering those. I feel mostly they mention - to include this or not to put anything other than this etc. I did type a semicolon for a statement, because I was only asked not to leave any space and it was a method call.
I did get all those famous media tracker, append, and socket etc. Thanks to forum, I could handle those.
I feel the GC and Threads, and the overloading and overriding parts were the ones where I lost my score.
As for GC and Threads, get the concepts because it more theory/sentence choice and confusing if u are not confident about the concepts.
For GC- Jyothi Krishna site is useful, but prob not enough.
For threads - I don't know what resource to suggest after seeing the ques, any book that explains the
thread behaviour and other concepts will be helpful. Try JLS and JVM too.In fact I am doing that to know what were actually right.
Regarding collections, I/O I suggest - just stick to the Sun objectives and ignore how much u get on these on the mock exams. Again make use of Jyothi site and other notes on the web, this will prob give u enough knowledge if u go as per the objectives. I wasted atleast 2 days before my exam panicking about this and I did get 100% in these topics, but see that means prob 5-6 ques and nothing so tough to spend 2 days.
The composition of ques that we get in the real exam is prob not always reflected in many mock exams , that is why we mix up our weak areas!!
I tried many of the mock exams on Maha's site and the links to the notes were very useful. The inner class points are quite clearly given in Java in a Nutshell. For Gridbag I just made use of the 4-5 pages of Java in 21 days book, just to understand and the mock exams were enough to get a feel of the nature of ques.
So that's my feedback on the exam, and hope to join u all here and in XML and HTML forums too. May start off with Swing and RMI ,but Developer is not on my mind right now.
So best of luck to all the aspirants and thanks to everybody !!
Regards
Usha