josette rigsby

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since Apr 04, 2002
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Recent posts by josette rigsby

see... in business, it is always about the bottom line... within reason (unless you are Enron).
J
The XML exam took me about a month and a half to prepare. I still failed the first time. Taking the real test was the best practice because the mock exams were no indicator of the actual exam.
I studied 3 weeks for the UML exam. The mock exam was actually pretty good in my opinion. Read both books, but if you already know UML concentrate on the Larman book. The only thing you really need to understand from Fowler is modeling prespectives, test by packages, and the notation.
Hope that helps.
JR
Oh yeah. I got 83%.
I just passed IBM 486. I thought the test was medium level in terms of difficulty. The only bad thing was the screen size in comparison to diagram size on questions with class and interaction diagrams. I skipped some questions because it was too frustrating to keep switching back and forth. Read the 2 recommended books and understand basic OO concepts and you'll pass. I thought the XML test was much harder.
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http://www.research.umbc.edu/~tarr/cs491/fall00/cs491.html
Lots of .pdfs on design patterns etc. I found it to be of good use in studying for 486.
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A customer can be an actor if they redefine the system boundary. This is what Larman (very poorly) tried to explain.
codediva
I was wondering, are there any estimates on how many people have passed 486? Just curious. I took the practice exam and scored 90%. I bought the Larman book -- already had the UML distilled from OO class I teach. I think I'm going to try to take the test in 2 weeks.
These are only available if you have a licensed copy of RUP. They are provided on the CD.
I will post the percentages in about an hour when I go out to my truck and get my score sheet. I didn't buy the prof. XSL book, so I didn't feel I needed it. I thought professional XML was enough for the XSLT coverage. I also read the spec though. I think the real key to the XSLT stuff is understanding what the Xpath selects. I didn't even read about the XSL-FO (though I should have since I scored 33% on rendering which was only 11% of the test!).
As far as studying. I studied about 2 weeks. I'm a single parent and a consultant that works a bunch of hours. I read the schema book 1 time and it took me about 3 days. I went back and read the highlighting the night before the test. I didn't do any example work. If english isn't your native language, you may want to work a little harder since the questions are often tersely worded.
Oh yeah, there's a chart in the schema book that shows the difference between DTD, schema, and competing schema technologies. While you don't need to worry about the competing tech. the chart is useful for comparing DTDs and schemas.
In closing (I know I type a lot :-), make sure you understand schema content models, stuff like, how you make a list, how to make something null, how to extend, restrict, or substitute. It seemed as if there were many questions on this. Know SAX and DOM -- just go ahead and read the spec. especially if you worked with MSXML and think you understand the DOM -- you probably don't know it in adequate detail. SAX is so small, just read the API. there is bound to be a couple of questions about the interfaces or the order that processing occurs. Know the DOM hierarchy -- what inherits from what and what you in general you can pass to the methods.
I hope that helps... I'm studying for Java programmer and IBM OOA and OOD now.
That's all folks,
--codediva
Oh yeah... In terms of time, I had plenty. I had 38 minutes left after I reviewed every single question.
codediva
I passed Saturday with a 72%. It's not a great score I know, but at least I didn't miss any architecture questions. Here are my suggestions to the struggling among you:
1. Go ahead and buy the professional XML and XML Schemas books. The books are highly influenced by the information in those two texts. I mean HIGHLY influenced.
2.Read the API documentation for DOM2 and SAX2. I know it's not fun, but it helped me.
3.Know the difference between the different technologies - what they can and can not do. This is especially important for namespaces, scheams content models, and XSLT vs CSS.
I took the practice test and bought XML whiz. In my humble opinion, don't waste your time. Just read. In fact, the practice test may give you a false sense of confidence, since MY real test didn't resemble the mock or the test product AT ALL!
The tests are very schema heavy. So pay attention a lot to those questions. Since a lot of technologies are based around XPath, make sure you are very familiar with how it works.
I hope this helps.
codediva
I'm taking the test this weekend. I bought the whizLabs tools and discovered I was horrible with XML rendering -- the XSLT stuff. But I passed all of the test including the final. Do you guys think that the difficulty of the whizLabs tests are reflective of the actual exam
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