Like a gamblin’ man with a losin’ hand
I’m waitin’ for a winnnin’ play
— Bobby Cochran and Harry Garfield in “LIFE IS A GAMBLE” 1976 release “Skullduggery”.
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
— Stephen Hawking
How I also became a Sun Certified Java Programmer
Background
I graduated in the Electrical and Electronics Engineering discipline last year. June 2008 to be exact. Had got a job placement at a leading IT services company. I waited for my offer and joining date but was greeted with the recession in the month of September 2008. Knew very well my date would be delayed, so i waited but hoping i would go in within December 2008. But recession only become worse and I wanted to do something useful rather than waste my time. My friends suggested that we do a certification to keep ourselves occupied and to remain competitive if things were to get further worse. We had procrastinated about doing the certification for about two months. Finally one fine day (Jan 8, 2009) me and my friend went and bought Java Certification Study Guide by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates. We decided to take up SCJP because we knew Java a little bit.
Study Phase
Kathy Sierra & Bert Bates Study Guide for SCJP
So me and two of my friends started preparing by studying together everyday for about an hour and a half. We progressed slowly but steadily. I usually would read beforehand the topic to be discussed and would explain to both my friends. Sometimes my friends would do it and I will lag behind. But we took a one full month plus some 10 days before we finished the Kathy Sierra guide.
Practising real exam questions
After completing the book I tried to solve the Self Test questions in the K&B Guide but performed very badly. I had anticipated this so was not disappointed. One of my friends got hold of a PDF containing previous real exam questions. We tested ourselves using it and my friend progressed quickly because he was very keen to take up the exam quickly. But i was lazy and did not have a fixed deadline. He took up the exam during February last week and scored 76%. I bought the Sun Voucher at that time.
Gathering Resources
I also had gathered a lot of resources on the web. Here is a collection of my resources.
SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 6 Study Guide (Exam 310-065) By Katherine Sierra, Bert Bates - The Best Guide available
SCJP 5 Notes By Dave Allen -Comprehensive tabulated Notes
SCJP Exam Notes Slides by Maggie Zhou - Also a comprehensive one with slides
Devaka Exam Simulator - A very tough mock exam simulator containing 5 exams. The real exam environment looks similar to this simulator. But the real exam questions are easy than this one.
Sun Java 6 Official API Documentation - Java reference
My delicious bookmarks tagged SCJP - All other resources including the ones above.
Taking Mock exams
I took a lot of mock exams starting from the ones provided on the CD of K&B Guide. Then Devaka’s mock exams. I jolted down the mistakes I made during the exam on a paper. I used to read it everyday before i take another exam and expanded the list as i took more exams. I was scoring around 40-50% on Devaka’s Exam Lab and 80-85% on K&B CD exams. That was when I decided to book the date. So one fine day I went and booked the exam and coincidentally it fell on my birthday.
4 Days before the exam
I revised the K&B guide and the notes of Dave Allen & Maggie Zhou. Also practised the PDF containing real exam questions.
Day of exam (March 16,2009)
I did not read anything on that day before taking the exam. The exam was scheduled at 10AM. I reached there by 9AM itself and was amused by a girl studying very passionately even when travelling on a elevator. So i sat there doing nothing for about an hour. The Prometric staff had come but to my disppointment my exam did not start by 10AM. Since only 3 people can take an exam at a time, I was waiting as the 4th person. By 10.40AM I finally took the test. I took about 160 minutes out of 210 minutes given to complete the test. I was also very hungry having eaten at 7AM itself.
Results
I completed the exam and clicked on PRINT to get my result. I scored 60/72 questions correct making a 83%. I was tired and happy, so got home quickly to eat.
Correlation does not imply causation
— If only a lot of people had understood this, the world would be better.
