Cleared SCWCD5 with 92%

Dear ranchers,

I am glad to inform you that I have appeared the SCWCD5 exam today and passed with a score of 92%. The score was lil bit disappointing because I was aiming for a higher one, but no I am happy since I managed to pass Even though I had several years of experience in J2EE development including struts, JSTL, EJB2 and custom tags, I never came across these many subtle details about Servlets and JSP. Thank you to all the ranchers here and ranch which is continually motivating me!

Preparation
I am working full time with very tight projects and have a family and a pretty busy social life. I spent couple of hours most of the days after work and some 4-5 hours on weekends
I used HSFJ from Sierra, Bates and Basham and it took me 2 months to cover the book 2 times. I did most of the examples in the book and some others.
Didn't use any IDE's for this preparation even though I was so tempted to use Eclipse/Ant etc. Used only Notepad++ and Tomcat 5.5 (stand alone deployment).
Skimmed through JSP, JSTL and EL specifications (links in SCWCD links page)
Read the Frits Walraven notes several times (which is a good summary of Bridgewater book) SCWCD links
Peabody notes in Design Patterns SCWCD links
Read API, full web.xml, tld, tag file, EL function, JSP implicit objects, EL implicit objects, page directive attributes, JSP standard and custom actions several times[/list]

Mock Exams
Did all 8 the enthuware mock exams and I found it really good and learned a lot.
My Enthuware scores are 64 (fail), 77, 77, 81, 84, 83, 84 and 81 in the first attempt.
After that I did Coffee Cram Final Exam and scored 74% (after looking at the errata for the book!)
Tried Marcus Green mock exam #1 and scored 94%

Real Exam
I would say exam was not super tough, but it was not easy either.
Most of the questions were testing your knowledge on several topics!
Most of the questions were based on a scenario or a situation and my experience helped me a lot with a lot of questions
You need to understand the API, deployment descriptor, JSP/EL implicit objects, EL, JSP custom/standard actions, Tag development in and out!
I got 6 questions from design patterns and got a 100% in that!
Answered 64/69 questions correctly. Missed one in servlet model, security, custom tag each and missed 2 in JSP actions
EL keep on coming everywhere even in questions which is not testing your EL knowledge. Make sure you understand the effects of using EL inside JSP actions, tags, everywhere.

What next?? SCBCD5 . I am not waiting for J2EE6 exams, whenever it comes I will change path accordingly. Would love to give the JSF exam next but it is only in the Beta stage .

Wish you all the best with exam preparations!!!

Congrats Rajeev

Its great that you shared your experience with others. Best of luck for SCBCD

Congratulations Rajeev!!

Thank you Ankit and Sandya!

Congratulations!!!
Glad to know that Enthuware tool helped.

Congrats!

Congratulations

Congratulations !

Thanks Paul, Jyothi, Rafel and Seetharan

Congrats!

Hi Rajeev,

Congratulations and I am glad my notes helped you a bit!

See you on the SCBCD forum, I am als working on SCBCD5, only my progress could be better:)

Regards,
Frits

Thanks Abimaran and Frits
Abimaran - best of luck with SCWCD!
Frits - Your notes were really nice and it helped me a lot! Good luck with your SCBCD. I haven't worked on EJB3. All projects I am working are still using EJB2 and not yet migrated (or rewritten) to EJB3 becuase of time / resource constraints! Anyways I started with the OReilly Enterprose Java Beans 3 book which is good and have lots of code examples (J Boss).!

Rajeev Rnair wrote:
Abimaran - best of luck with SCWCD!

Thanks Rajeev Rnair, really nice!