Random 29 Aug 2003 04:27 pm
Certified
As of today, I’m officially a Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform, version 1.4. The test was not very hard, and I don’t think I was particularly well-prepared for it. In fact, I was a little surprised at not seeing any questions about Swing (which I know about); now, looking at the test objectives, I noticed that they do not mention Swing at all. In fact, none of the Java certifications mention Swing, but the Certified Developer test includes creating an application with a GUI, so I guess it would be necessary, after all.
I did see questions about assertions, which I have never used or even studied. They were mostly “common-sense” questions about what you would use assertions for and how, so that wasn’t a problem.
I got the worst score of all sections in the one about “Fundamental Classes in the java.lang Package”. My guess as for reason for this is that the documentation for the classes is always right at your fingertips when you are programming, so it’s not something you need to memorize. You eventually do, of course, but you don’t have to.
Best scores: “Operators and Assignments” and “The Collections Framework”. No big surprise there, I guess.
The next steps from here are either “Certified Developer” or “Certified Web Component Developer” (J2EE). I honestly don’t know which direction to follow (and yes, I know the are not mutually exclusive), but I’m leaning towards J2EE. I guess I’ll just toss a coin…
