Just over a week ago, I took the Sun Certified Web Component Developer (Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 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:

• 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.
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This last Friday I took the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam (Java 5 edition). I am going to talk about the experience, what I would have done differently and why it will end up mattering.

So just how hard is the SCJP? Instead of phrasing it in some vague way, I’m going to tell you what I did and how it all worked out for me. For starters, I studied for about 25 hours over the course of 10 days before my exam. I would say that having 18 months of Java experience did not help much. I also took 2 practice tests but they weren’t as helpful as I would’ve liked. However, I do still highly recommend reading the SCJP Study Guide by Sierra and Bates. It was fairly thorough and contained many helpful tips. Continue reading →