Blog : Lessons learned from the SCWCD

Just over a week ago, I took the Sun Certified Web Component Developer (Java EE 5) exam. I’m going to share the positives and negatives of the experience so you can learn if you want to take then exam, and how to go about studying.

About the SCWCD
There are 11 main topics of the exam. I’d say they were all either very easy or quite difficult, there was very little middle ground in my opinion:
SCWCD Study Guide

• Servlet Technology Model
• Structure and Deployment of Web Applications
• The Web Container Model
• Session Management
• Web Application Security
• The JavaServer Pages (JSP) Model
• Expression Language (EL)
• Standard Actions in JSP
• Tag Libraries in JSP
• Building a Custom Tag Library
• Java EE Patterns

The newest version of the exam requires 49 of 69 correct answers (70%), and touts questions that exercise your practical ability (as opposed to your memorization) more than previous versions.

How I studied
Unlike the SCJP, where I don’t think experience was of much use, I feel like my previous web programming experience helped out with several sections of the SCWCD.

I gave myself over 3 months of time to prepare for this test (as opposed to 10 days when I took the SCJP), did a lot of coding and went through most of the exercises in the SCWCD Study Guide I picked up.

I also went ahead and passed all of the relevant exams I could take on JavaBlackBelt and JavaRanch, and they helped to cover some things that the book did not.

How I’d study if I had to take it again
If I had to do it again, I’d give myself exactly one month. 3 months is too long. Even though I did a good amount of practice, I definitely forgot some of the intricate details that might have helped me on the exam. I would code, code, code just like I recommended for the SCJP. I took my own advice and I think it paid off.

I would still grab the SCWCD Study Guide as it had great examples and assignments. I found out the morning of the exam, though, that this book is for the old version of the exam and therefore the practice questions were mostly worthless. Luckily, the objectives are the same and obviously not all was lost.

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Courtesy:- Eriwen.com