Hi guys,
I cleared SCEA5 with 80% and this forum was very helpful. I would have liked to score more, but unfortunately I didnt get a good score in WebTier technologies (37%), bringing my overall score down.
Material I used
-Sun
JEE 5 Tutorial
-SCEA book by Mark Cade/Sheil
-Wikipedia for GoF design
patterns
-Sun blueprint for Core J2EE Patterns
-Whizlabs for mock exams
-Online material on different topics
I did not have enough time to study (4 weeks in total, due to some job constraints), so I think I should have planned this better if I wanted a higher score.
My perspective on the exam-
The exam is very well rounded, and you need to supplement your studies with a lot of extra reading on the web. There is no single book that will have all the topics centralized in one place and resources are scattered all over the web. You need patience and good planning so that you are able to supplement
SCEA books by online material.
-Understanding NFRs and two-tier vs three-tier is a must. Practice scenarios based questions on these rather than just learning by rote.
-Read on EJB3 and what are the improvements over EJB2
-Read about
JSF, AJAX and
JSP. Know when and how JSF and AJAX can be used. Known the pros and cons of thick client vs thin client.
-Read different resources on JAAS, JCA, SSL.
You should be familiar with symmetric/asymmetric cryptography, digital certificates, one-way hash functions
-Read about JCA, JMS,
SOAP, JAX-WS, CORBA and RMI. There were a lot of questions on these.
-A lot of questions were on design patterns. Dont learn them by rote just for the exam, try to picture them in what scenarios you would use them and why. Try to come up with examples of where a pattern is applied in JEE (eg: Flyweight in Connection Pooling, Decorator in BufferedReader etc).
I did write notes, which I will share in my next post.
All the best to other aspirants.