SCJP rants
Hello world,
I’m currently preparing for CX-310-065, you name it, “Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform, Standard Edition 6″. It’s interesting to learn about the gory details of Java, although it does sometimes require a good bit of Buddha-like meditation to make it through the SCJP dungeon. Here’s why:
- Many of the exam questions seem to be pure tests for the trained eye. Most of the example code would blast into red x’es in Eclipse, or whatever icon your favourite IDE would put in place. Are there any serious Java programmers out there using vi?
- Getting the voucher is a WoW-like quest. If you live in Germany, you cannot order the voucher via Sun’s US website. (Which they tell you only as soon as you log in, and then your shopping cart is automatically emptied) If you order the voucher from the german website, you are under the impression that you are ordering a voucher for a german test. Bad if you are preparing using an english book.
- There are different conditions regarding the exam. If you take the english version, you are given a lower number of questions. The amount of correct answers for both versions is roughly equivalent if you express it in percent.
- You have to schedule and take the exam via Prometric – they have an ultra-slow website. Waiting for 2 to 3 minutes between pages is not uncommon. Additionally, I remember the site going down all the time while I was taking my JBoss test in 2007.
- If you have made it through the Prometric website and you did NOT get the voucher beforehand, you have to go back all the way, feeling a slight bit of pain because you didn’t realize that you CAN NOT buy a voucher directly from Prometric – they do have pricing information on their site though.
In the end, putting aside all the technical trouble and the mix of information you find on the various SUN websites, I’m a little concerned with the title I’m going to earn – “Certified Programmer” sounds pretty nice, but as soon as you pass the exam, you won’t have written a single line of Java code, unless you have tried some of the examples from the various books. Good for me that I’ve been collecting development experience for about two and a half years by now, this makes the certificate a sensible … certificate :-) And of course it’s a prerequisite for the higher levels of certification, like the SCWCD, Sun Certified Web Component Developer, which I’m going to tackle in the near future. Wish me luck for the exam. Thanks :-)