I've had passing part one on my to-do list for a while, but I always had other things to do. Early this year I bought the voucher with the "one free retry" deal, thinking that I would take the exam, probably not pass, and then retake it after studying the parts I was weak on. Well, I still didn't get around to studying much. Last week I was reading through the Cade book, and I found the receipt for the book stuck in there, from 2005. So I scheduled the
test for today. I took yesterday and today off, and spent the time in various Starbucks, reading through the books. I took the exam this afternoon, and passed. I'm embarrassed to say my score, but as the lady at the testing center said, "Nobody asks what your score was".
My lessons learned:
I answered much of the questions from my work experience. But even though some of the questions dealt entirely with technologies I've used, the English wording of the question made it hard for me to answer. I'm impressed that a non-native English speaker could pass this.I could answer some of the questions logically. If I only knew part of the answer, often I could puzzle out the rest of it, or rule out some of the possible answers.The questions on patterns were limited. I was able to get by knowing only the most common patterns.I've never worked with JSF. During the test I wished I was more familiar with the differences between JSP and JSF.If there was one thing I wished I could have during the test, it was a list of one sentence descriptions of JAX-WS, JAX-RPC, JAXB, JAXP, JAXR, and anything else that starts with JAX.
On to part two! I'm not worried about this, it will be a lot like what I do for work.