I am glad to inform that I have just passed Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 platform, Standard Edition 5.0, which is shortly called as SCJP 5.0.
I have taken exam today at 12:30 pm at Prometric (Unisoft Technologies) in Vizag. I could finish the exam almost 30 minutes before the actual time (175 Minutes). I scored 97% that is 70 correct answers of 72 questions.
If you are interested to see how the score sheet looks like, then click here for marksheet.
It would take 30 days to get the actual certificate from Sun Microsystems, which will be directly posted to my mail address.
I just wanted to throw a challenge to myself and see how would I fare. I was made to believe by many forums and discussions in internet that 97% is a very good score. Though passing was the main criteria, getting good score was always on my mind from the day I wanted to take the exam.
What benefits did I get? Certainly I am more knowledgable Java programmer than what I was before I started preparing for certification. It helped me to get into more details and fill a few gaps that I had regarding Java. This is the major benefit for any professional like me.
I have read completely three books on certification, they are :
First two books are great. I suggest you pick up Third Edition for Khalid's book as it covers Java 5.0.
I have taken good number of mock exams in various website. A few that I remember are:
That is the list I can quickly recollect. I will provide more information at a later stage.
The truth regarding resources is; NOT much is available on Java 5.0. A lot of questions are related to Java 1.4. But real exam bombards you on Generics (with wildcard characters mixing with non-generics), Boxing, Enumeration, Varargs, Static imports, Regular expressions , Formatting, Tokenizing, IO Streams, and other issues that are not part of Java 1.4.
I would say I prepared for it and I am happy to get 97%. I believe certification is no cake-walk for any professional. One need some exclusive preparation for it.
If my time premits, I would like to take a few more exams certainly.
