I passed the SCEA Phase1! And I scored 64 which is not a great score but I feel very happy and relaxed. I am a silent spectator of Ranch but I am a regular visitor. Thanks a lot to all dear ranchers for all support and encouragement. My experience with the test
1. Many questions from web-tier, especially JSF, JSP (You should know the Servlet/JSP, JSF, JSTL in term of applicability, usage, benefits)
2. Design pattern questions were very straight forward. If you read GoF book, I am sure you can clear all questions. J2EE pattern questions were fairly straight.
3. Questions from applicability of JAX-WS, Web services Vs Messaging were all confusing for me. Fortunately I read the JEE tutorial and that helped me.
4. Not many questions from security and JPA.
5. Surprisingly, couple of question based of SOA was there (SOA from web service point of view)
6. All common architecture questions disappointed me as I was not confident on all these �ilities� like maintainability, manageability etc. Mikalai Zaikin�s notes (
http://java.boot.by/scea5-guide/) was very helpful while preparing.
7. 75% of the questions were scenario based questions. You need to read fast. I used Whizlab simulator and that helped me a lot. When compared to Whizlab, questions were much tougher but it certainly helps. I did not find a good online mock test for SCEA!
8. My strategy to tackle the long questions was very simple, finished all small questions first (I had 50 mnts to review my questions) and then looked into lengthy questions.
The materials I refered
1.GoF books (I read it 6 times since Jan 2008. I scored 100% in patterns)
2.Core J2EE patterns (Deepak Alur, Dan Malks, John Crupi)
3.EJB 3 in action from manning(I wasted so much of time in mugging up all those annotations and JPA but it did not help me much)
4.Mastering JSF
5.Mastering Enterprised Java bean (Ed Roman). If you are new to EJB I would recommend this book.
6.
http://java.boot.by/scea5-guide/ - A really good one. This was the last material I referred and I really helped.
7.tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/scea_j2ee �
8.
http://jeyana.blogspot.com/ 9.The JEE tutorial from Sun - ** this is the most important resource you should refer to, you may want to start with this.
That is my story. I am very happy to be part of Javaranch. It is simply great. Thanks a ton for those who are working in the background to keep Ranch running.
Wishing you all a Merry X-Maz and New year
Sandeep