xing wu

Congrats, Bill!

Thanks Perseus and Valentin I am planning to take my certification to the next level. I'd like to get the architect certification. Would it be a good idea if I take it directly and skip the SCWD? I have 2 project lead experience using OOAD, UML, patterns, & requirements analysis and 4 projects using jsp/serlvets and 1 using EJB. I would appreciate any insights/suggestions from you. Thanks!

I just hurdled the SCJP 1.4 exam Sept 30 and got 70% rating. I've been coding in Java for about 2 years now. My exam preparation had been on and off as I do my review in between projects. Sometimes I have a month of review then there's a 6 months log due to projects. I only had 2 weeks intensive review and about a week for the mock exams before the taking the actual exam.
The questions were not that tough, as compared to Dan Chrisholm's mock exams, except for Threads, Garbage Collection, and a mixture of Threads with Inner Classes.
I used Roberts and Mughal's certification books for review. For mock exams, I concentrated using Dan Chrisholm's as it's the most updated for the 1.4 version. For other mock,I only tried a few as they are not that updated for the 1.4 version.
Thanks to JavaRanch folks for your insights. This site was really of big help.

All data members of a class that implements Serializable are serialized, except transient and static. Declaring a member variable as both transient and static is redundant. As such, transient modifiers should not be specified for static variables.

So I guess final or static specifiers are immaterial.

Yes, I agree. Transient has meaning only in relation to serializing an object's state. For the sake of consistency in it's intent, wouldn't it be a good idea that Java should not allow such syntax? (Just wondering)

I agree with Ron.
Manish Hatwalne shares the principle in his interesting article on Equals and Hash Code. He wrote :

Equal objects must produce the same hash code as long as they are equal, however unequal objects need not produce distinct hash codes.

Here's the question:

The following declaration(as a member variable) is correct or not?.
static final transient int maxElements = 100;
A) It's correct.
B) It's not correct.

My answer is B. As I understand it, transient modifer should not be specified for static variables, as these do not belong to objects.
Thanks for your enlightenment.

I just updated my display name.
I'm still using SDK1.2 compiler though. I'll try the higher versions. Thanks for your comments.

Accdg. to one of my SCJP certification books " if an instance initializer block does not catch a checked exception that can occur during its execution, then the exception must be declared in the throws clause of every constructor in the class".
However, I tried coding it below and the compiler wont allow me to throw a checked exception :
class MyException extends Exception{
public MyException(String msg) { super(msg); }
}
public class MainClass {
public static void main(String args[]){
try {
new InitBlock();
}catch(MyException e){}
}
}
class InitBlock{
boolean test;
{
test = true;
if(test) throw new MyException("throw...");
}
InitBlock() throws MyException {
super();
}
}
Thanks for your help. This is my first posting