Firstly, thank for your reply Paul. I did take on board what your said but as I mentioned work was putting a bit of pressure on me to take the exam. Earlier in the week my manager suggested I take the exam and see how I got on, no pressure. So I actually took the exam today and passed with a score of 76%
I've enjoyed reading the threads from others on this Forum about how others got on, so I guess I better share my own experience.
In the days since my original post, I did the final day Whizlabs
test getting a score of 76% (although this should have been slightly lower as Whizlabs seem to give marks for partially correct questions since they upgraded to their new site a few days ago) and did the final Enthuware exam getting a score of 58%
The actual exam itself was extremely close to the final Enthuware exam, I could have sworn at least 10% - 15% of the questions I got on the real exam were on the Enthuware final exam, so good work on that front. It definitely helped my score.
I agree with your statement that merely taking mock tests does not help, however I was not simply taking the mock tests, I was taking the examples given and using them, playing around with them in order to understand the concepts better. If I can put it in some context; I originally started with the Finnegan and Liguori book about 3 months ago, I ran through this book twice to make sure I understood it and then took the first Whizlabs exam. Upon taking this exam it was evident that the Finnegan and Liguori book does not cover all the material on the exam, therefore I spent some time playing with the types of questions/sections of code in the Whizlab exams which weren't covered in the Finnegan and Liguori book. I felt I still had gaps in my knowledge so on the recommendation of reviews on Amazon and people on here, I got Mala Gupta's excellent book. After completing this book I felt comfortable with the level on questions on the Whizlabs site, however just to be thorough I decide to try the Enthuware exams that everyone was mentioning. This was like Deja Vu in that the material in Mala's book didn't seem to cover a lot of the question on the Enthuware exams. So in the course of doing the Enthuware exams if I came across a question/concept not covered in Mala's book then I would again take the code sample and play around with it to better understand the concepts. While the harder question on the Enthuware exam did help my score, some of them did feel like overkill but I appreciate that they're only there because people report getting those type of question in the actual exam.
Anyway that's my 2 cents, I just wanted to also say thanks to Mala, Mr. Finnegan and Mr. Liguori, and the folks and Whizlabs(even though they did also lose some of my test scores when migrating to their new website!) and Enthuware. Now it's time to grab a beer
