SCJP 5 Questions Questions Questions

This is my (current) tactic into getting myself match fit for the SCJP exam.

Although reading articles, books and online stuff helps to learn the basic knowledge of Java, I have decided that to really get my knowledge up I am going to have to keep practicing questions.

I think the problem with reading books/articles is that it's quite a passive way of learning and sometimes it's difficult to know if you are actually taking in the information.

I have been doing my daily question as usual at at Marcus Green's excellent SCJP Mock exam question a day site

http://www.examulator.com/phezam/question.php

it also has a link to a database of 60 Java 5 SCJP questions. I try to do the question of the day and then 10 more before starting work. If I get a question wrong then I note it down. I have found that doing questions helps you test your knowledge and reinforce it if you get it right and then if you get it wrong, you investigate why and are less likely to caught out again.

Doing questions also helps you get up to speed with the typical exam tricks that you are going to be faced with.

So recently I have been looking for some more questions to do and I found this site

http://www.javareference.com/testcenter/

It doesn't have that many questions but it's good practice until you have done them all.

I have been working through the tricky tricky questions in my SCJP book, the questions are right swines and I am only getting about half right at the moment (ahhh 9 percent short of a pass!!!) but even though I have got only half of them right I think it is worth while doing the questions because it has highlighted some areas that I am not sure about. It has also hopefully picked up some areas where the exam is going to try and catch me out.

If I take them again in a few days I will hopefully get more right because I will be watching out for certain tricks, although this isn't that a good test because I will have answered the questions before. I think the point I am trying to make is that by doing questions you are finding areas where you knowledge is lacking but how would you know this by just reading a chapter of a book or article etc.

I have a link to 11 questions by Katherine Sierra and Bert Bates which I plan to tackle in the next day or so.

http://hoskinator.blogspot.com/2006/05/11-scjp-java-questions-come-on-test.html

If anyone has any links to any automated SCJP 5 question websites then please leave them in the comments, it's much easier when you just have to tick a box etc rather than writing the answers on a piece of paper.

Also Java Black belt is quite good for testing yourself, although some of the questions waiting to be verified can be of poor quality, overall it isn't bad

http://www.javablackbelt.com/

They have also recently added a Java 5 exam, which is pretty good.