Ben Leadholm

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since Nov 29, 2005
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Recent posts by Ben Leadholm

I passed the exam yesterday, only 69%, but a pass is a pass. I wanted to share some thoughts about what YOU could do to get a better score than I did.

I did NOT take the practice exam at the end of the HFSJ book. I left it for the last minute, and then thought my time would be better spent cramming the notes that I had made. So DON'T make the same mistake that I did -- take the practice test roughly ONE WEEK before you take the exam, and then concentrate on your weaker areas. DON'T blow off the end-of-chapter tests, either.

I did NOT use these forums as extensively as I should have. I won't make that mistake in studying for my next certification...

I DID make my own notes, often copying from the HFSJ book verbatim (even using good-old Paint for many of the diagrams). In the end, I had an 80+ page Word document that I could take along for review.

I DID setup an ANT script that would let me quckly create and deploy the test files in the book to Tomcat. Some learn through words, but I learn by doing. Having the quick feedback was important, and I would suggest the next edition of HF(fill in the blank) include either ANT or Maven to show some sort of automated build and deploy tool.

I did NOT have extensive Tomcat or Web server experience (my background is POJO and JMS), so I came to this topic behind others who have this background. Creating my own notes, actually trying the code, and (of course) HFSJ helped me achieve this milestone.

I really can't say enough about the HF series. I'm not alone in wanting HF for Web Services!!

BTW, I want to thank Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates for being gracious enough to not only say 'hi' when I met them at the Sun Certified party at JavaOne2005, but to stay at the table and answer many questions people had. (I didn't know they used stock photo clips throughout their books.) QUALITY FOLKS--I hope you get the opportunity to meet them sometime.

Ben
18 years ago
Congratu-phuquin-lations!!! I'm in the same boat. I passed with 48 questions correct (69%). A pass is a pass. WELCOME to the club!!
Ben
18 years ago
Hey Mike,

I've just passed the SCWCD exam myself. I'm kind of torn between SCBCD and Sun's Java Web Services exam... I've already got the Head First EJB, so that's what I'm starting out on...
However, there is talk out there that EJBs are history. You can do a lot of similar things with Hibernate or Spring. (I can hear it now.. "EJBs?? They're so 2002!")

I've been told in a Java User Group to not even start with Struts, but go direct to Spring.

Sorry for the non-answer, but I can begin to learn EJBs and get far enough along to (hopefully) pass the SCBCD exam, then I can use that as a further platform for other certs. Nobody ever fired someone because they knew EJBs.


Ben
I would say that 95% of what I learned was from HFSJ. Another 2% was from another book from Manning press, and 3% from these forums. I might add that I would have scored better if I had monitored these forums more often, but I learned enough to handle some tricky questions nicely.
I passed the exam yesterday, only 69%, but a pass is a pass. I wanted to share some thoughts about what YOU could do to get a better score than I did.

I did NOT take the practice exam at the end of the HFSJ book. I left it for the last minute, and then thought my time would be better spent cramming the notes that I had made. So DON'T make the same mistake that I did -- take the practice test roughly ONE WEEK before you take the exam, and then concentrate on your weaker areas. DON'T blow off the end-of-chapter tests, either.

I DID make my own notes, often copying from the HFSJ book verbatim (even using good-old Paint for many of the diagrams). In the end, I had an 80+ page Word document that I could take along for review.

I DID setup an ANT script that would let me quckly create and deploy the test files in the book to Tomcat. Some learn through words, but I learn by doing. Having the quick feedback was important, and I would suggest the next edition of HF(fill in the blank) include either ANT or Maven to show some sort of automated build and deploy tool.

I did NOT have extensive Tomcat or Web server experience (my background is POJO and JMS), so I came to this topic behind others who have this background. Creating my own notes, actually trying the code, and (of course) HFSJ helped me achieve this milestone.

I really can't say enough about the HF series. I'm not alone in wanting HF for Web Services!!

BTW, I want to thank Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates for being gracious enough to not only say 'hi' when I met them at the Sun Certified party at JavaOne2005, but to stay at the table and answer many questions people had. (I didn't know they used stock photo clips throughout their books.) QUALITY FOLKS--I hope you get the opportunity to meet them sometime.

Kayal,

I don't know if this would answer your problem, but if your app server has JSTL examples, use the JAR files and URI from the examples in your application. For example, I had the same error that you did when I was working with Tomcat. I had inadvertently used the wrong JAR directory (standard-1.0/lib rather than standard/lib ) when referencing the Jakarta JSTL libraries.

Don't know why a re-start would solve the issue, but at least you're off and running !!
18 years ago
JSP