Hi fella ranchers,
The following comments aim at making your study easier and more effective.
I love answering your questions and what follows should in no way discourage you to post your questions.
1. USE THE SEARCH ENGINE There is a search engine at JavaRanch and it is there for you guys to use it. How many times have we come across closely related questions in two days interval? Too often. A good example, is the ever-coming-back question about
String literals and String objects and how they are garbage collected. That question is asked, like, almost everyday. You are just wasting your time and the time of the guys who respond since the answer is out there. Lazyness is no excuse
2. TRY YOUR CODE The key to your success towards being certified is lots of practice. PRACTICE! In my opinion, one cannot pretend being an
SCJP without having even written one line of code. If your goal is just to gain some
Java knowledge to augment your cultural package then ok. But if you aim at being a programmer one day, you have to code. Experience is the key. How many times have we seen questions like this one:
In that mock exam there was the following code:
My question is:"What does the code do?"
COME ON! How dare you? When you come across some code you don't understand at the first sight, copy-paste it inside your favorite editor, compile it and run it. Try to decorticate it. Try to understand the tiniest detail of it. By doing so, you'll quickly gain a lot of understanding of how Java works.
Again, lazyness is no excuse!
3. CONSULT THE API For those who don't know where to get the API, here it is:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/index.html How many times have we seen questions like:
"What does the method abs() in the class Math do?"
or
"Is Runnable an interface or a class?"
For those who don't know it yet, an API is a sort of resume of what the libraries can do. USE THEM! There is no way you can program in Java if you don't use them. The exam asks a lot of questions related to the API. You have to know what argument a constructor can take or what type a method returns. At the beginning you'll have to look at it lots of times, but with the time, you'll notice that you begin to know some part of the API by heart and THIS IS GOOD. Writing Java applications without looking at the API is like writing a text in a language you don't know and you have to look every
word of the text in a dictionary. Not very efficient, it'll take a looooooong time, and time is money (your manager knows that
). To me, not looking at the API is clearly a sign of lazyness
.
4. CONSULT THE JLS Very important point. The Java Language Specification is to Java what the Bible is to the Christians and the Coran to the Muslims (sorry for the other religions
). The JLS defines what Java is and every tiny details about the language. You can find everything in there, except some special topics like garbage collection. The answer to a question like "Can a final method be overridden?" can be found in the JLS in like two seconds. The link to that important document is:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/html/jTOC.doc.html My advice is to read it in its entirety, but if you don't feel like it or don't have the time, ok then. It's not a requirement, just an advice. You'd be amazed what you can find in there. I must admit that some parts are very cryptic, that's why I only
recommend the reading.
5. READ THE QUESTIONS CAREFULLY Pay attention to the wording of the question. Lots of the questions are playing with the words. You must read and understand each word of the question. There has often been the case where questions were misinterpreted and pointed out as being wrongly answered just because the question has not been read properly. BUT there are also mock exams authors who don't care about wording and the only thing the mocks does is to confuse you more than it helps.
You should drop those mocks as soon as you notice that the wording is just a joke.
6. FORMAT YOUR CODE This is sort of important if you want the people to get a precise idea of what your code is doing. Just put the code inside
tags.
Ok I think I'm done for the time being, take those advices for what they are worth to you.
Happy mocking !
------------------
Valentin Crettaz
Sun Certified Programmer for Java 2 Platform
[Valentin added an important point about code formatting as pointed out by Jose Botella]
[This message has been edited by Valentin Crettaz (edited December 03, 2001).]
