Review Strategy for SCJP
It's February. And unless I run out of budget or our client brings up another killer request, nothing's gonna stop me from taking the SCJP 1.5 this coming March. I feel a little down when I scored low(actually, failed) on the examulator mock exam (trial version). The good thing though is that I realized my weakpoints!
- regular expressions
- threading
- generics
and other new features in Java 5.
I'm pretty confident that I have a solid understanding of Java(1.4) fundamentals and throught for sometime that I should take 1.4 instead of 1.5. But I don't really have the privilege of doing that since by March, there will be a new project and we'd probably be busy fixing some bugs on our current client's project. As a sort of strategy, like many other developers who review for SCJP I do have a study guide:
Sybex - Complete Java 2 Certification - Study Guide, 5Th Ed - 2005
Which I think, is one of the cheapest but quite decent book for review. It may not be as good as K&B's book, but it's sufficient(according to my teamlead who is SCJP for 1.4). Aside from that, I also take mock exams from other websites such as:
http://forums.javabeat.net/index.php?topic=5.0It's fun and more and more I come to prove to myself that there really is still a lot of things to learn about the basics. I also try to code to prove the theories I learned. I try to separate the topics in different packages such as the one shown below.
I'm really feeling lazy typing in notepad and compiling in the command line so I prefer using an IDE like eclipse. Although, compiling from the commandline would probably be more effective for some other people.
It's also helpful to ask in the
javaranch SCJP forums. That's it! I don't want to be wasting $200 just to fail the test!