SCJP

I am invited to participate in the Java Certification Day on 21 June in Hong Kong. The talk mainly introduces some new technologies in the Java World, but I think they are not quite useful.

The first talk I attended is “Java Programming with no Java *code*”. The name is so attracting but the content is rubbish. It just introduces how Netbeans creates a BPEL project. It is not really about JAVA programming, it’s a construction of SOA projects.

The second talk is about non-intrusive monitoring using JMX. Other than the introduction of two softwares, JConsole and JFluid, I don’t think the talk is worth attending. And the last talk is on “High Performance Java Technology in a Multi-core World”, it did state how hardward can help to improve the performance of Java applications, but that’s not my knowledge field. That’s why I leave earlier (actually it overruns a lot).

After that, I went outside and proceeded to the promotional counter. After discussion with an Education Manager, I am much clear about my certification path. Personally, I want to take the SCEA exam as a long-term objective. Before that, I will take SCWCD and SCBCD which I did set as objective this year. Thus, I bought two discounted exam coupons and two corresponding ePractice exams. Totally, it costs me HKD2000. The price is acceptable and I hope this is worth and get me to a good career in the next job.

Yeah!! I have successfully passed the SCJP exam on last Saturday. It’s not as difficult as I think, perhaps that’s the reason for the mock exam.

I got 62 questions correct out of 72, which scored me 86%. I accepted this score in terms of doing an exam on Java 5. It’s lucky already because many skills like Generics, I even didn’t write a system on it.

In order to pass the exam, I will also leave some hints. I got two books, which was introduced here before. Work on the mock exam questions will be very useful, since I can find at least twenty questions in the real exam which are exactly the same as the mock questions.

For the next step, I may plan to study on either SCWCD or SCBCD. In fact, I do want to know more about EJB at this moment, especially the new EJB 3.0 specification. As it provides a brand new framework that allows developers to work on really the business logic. They need not to care about the codes like implementing SessinoBean and EntityBean anymore. The development becomes more reflective and easy.

Finally, I have booked the SCJP exam to be on the coming Saturday in Hong Kong. It is the first public IT exam for me. I’m very nervous now, since I think my knowledge is not enough yet.

The exam for SCJP 5.0 really gets a lot harder than previous version. It contains many new topics. In fact, the major reason that I think it is difficult is due to lack of programming. After I entered the current job, most of my office hours are dealing with documents and documents. I seldom have time and chance to work on programming. This makes me less practice on JAVA. Thus, to be a good programmer, do more programme!

I have just bought another book for the preparation of SCJP 5.0. Actually the topics covered in this new exam is quite a lot. When I tried the mock exam before, I just got a low mark. Compared to my result when I was studying in University, it’s really a big gap.

That’s why I decided to buy some more teaching materials, which helps me to learn more. The book I bought named as “Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 Study Guide”, my version is a Chinese one. It is a recommendation from many of the web users who took the SCJP exam. Hope I can finish the book shortly and take the SCJP exam.

Thanks to messages from the classmates of AJAX Work Shop, I have gathered some very good references which can help me to better prepare my SCJP exam in the coming future.

Web Resources:

“Thinking in Java”. Although it’s not intended exactly for scjp students but there are many related topics discussed - http://forums.theajaxworkshop.com/viewtopic.php?t=148&highlight=

Chock-full of Java exams resources -
http://www.javaranch.com/

Dan Chisholm Certified Java Programmer Mock Exam -
http://www.danchisholm.net/

Books:

A Programmer’s Guide to Java Certification by Khalid A. Mughal / Rolf
W. Rasmussen
Sun Certified Programmer & Developer for Java 2 Study Guide (Exam
310-035 & 310-027) (Paperback) by Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates

Both of these books can be borrowed from Hong Kong Public Library.

My Choice:

For myself, I finally picked a Chinese book which I will enjoy reading Chinese technical book rather than an English one, which calls:

JAVA 認證 - SCJP 5.0 猛虎出閘 published by GOTOP from Taiwan

I bought this book since it contains many questions which I can focus on whether I know the SCJP level questions.

Links for preparation on SCJP:

ExamsGuide.com - http://www.examsguide.com/scjp/freequestions.html

Someone’s experience - http://www.mihaiu.name/2004/sun_java_scjp_310_035/

TestKing - http://www.testking.com/

Another site - http://home.tiscali.nl/~bmc88/java/javacert/

China IT Lab - http://download.chinaitlab.com/

PassBible - http://www.passbible.com/testking.htm

Study Guide:

ePlanetLabs - http://eplanetlabs.com/scjp.html

SCJP Tiger Study Guide - http://java.boot.by/scjp-tiger/