There are two opposite oppinions on java certificates: the first is that the mean and give you nothing, the second is that it helps get a better job and request much bigger salary.
My oppinion is that it is a nice way to make you study hard for a while to get to the “next level”. The certification books help you systematize your knowledge, which you received at your work. As usually, one should not overvalue the certificate itself :) I personally know several guys with a bunch of certificates, whom I would never hire for a decent job :)
So the very first Java certificate is the Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP). It is relatively easy to get (at least I don’t know anybody who had failed). It took me only a year of working experience (first Java year) and later - a month of relaxed reading in the evening. I don’t remember exactly how the book was called, it had something like “exam cram” :) in its name. This certificate made me think like a compiler while looking at the Java code, a “power programmer” you know. What I’ve read some programmers don’t bother to know even despite their 5 year experience in Java.
The second exam was yet another beast. This is the Sun Certified Java Developer (SCJD). It is composed of two parts - first you write an app, and wait for assignment evaluation results. It took Sun more than a month to evaluate it in my case, so be patient. After the assignment had been accepted you will write a short essay - answer questions on your product. The main goal of this whole thing is to make sure you can follow the requirements, be it a hint or explicit MUST. The technologies used - Swing for the client part (with every new JDK this task becomes easier), RMI for server connection. All in all the assignment was quite amusing. I liked it actually. That’s why it is so hard to compose a book on this exam - it is always different. I have however found and read a book on it, the name also contained “exam cram” :) Won’t tell you if it helped a lot, however I caught the essential idea - you’re gonna make it if you try. Writing the application took me a whole of 2 months, I did not write every day and mostly did this at work (my wife does not let me sit in front of a computer at home :)) Afterwards I counted the amount of time it took me to write the application - about 60 hours. Most of the time was spent on validation and testing. I received a rather good score - some 89%. The maximum was for Locking (which I did not expect), as for the GUI it was only 75%..
The third certificate - Sun Certified Web Components Developer (SCWCD), I received it without much previous experience in the topic. We just expected a big web project at that time and I decided to “read a little about the web”. I recommend you start with the Servlets specification. It is very simple and straightforward - just the dos and don’ts. As for the JSP I read the book “SCWCD study kit” by Paul Sanghera. It has a lot of pages, which are not all necessarily useful. However I still use this book as a web technologies reference. Pay close attention to web.xml tags, their names and even positions in the document. This is a very useful knowledge for the exam, however there is little use in real life for that - do you edit xml files in notepad? This ceritifcation brought me the status of living encyclopedia on Java web technologies. In our team I am the one to talk to if you have a tricky question :)
I managed to order the fourth certificate just one day before it officially ceased to exist - too old version of EJB. This is the Sun Certified Business Components Developer 1.3 (SCBCD). Really nothing to talk about, as there is a newer version of this exam already, and there are no book on the exam anyway. I read one book on it, the Paul Sanghera’s “SCBCD study guide”, however this is not the definitive guide for passing. For a quick exam cram you can use this wonderful site. All certificates are concisely covered there. Another good free resource with a lot of exam questions. Just before the exam I read the EJB specification and understood that all my previous efforts were in vain - the spec is the best source for preparation. It contains a lot of figures and what is more precious - it has little tables with bean state diagrams, these tables will answer 80% of exam questions (pay close attention to where in the bean code you can invoke transactional, security methods, etc.) I passed the test with 98% :) So if you are going to take a new version of this exam, don’t hesitate - just read the EJB 3.0 spec and you’re ready.
First published on the old anydoby.com blog on 2008-03-14.