Passed the SCJP exam

Many years ago I wanted to get an SCJP exam, but changed jobs before I could take it and later forgot about it somehow. Last month I decided that I'd take care of this unfinished business.

It took me a bit less than 2 weeks to prepare spending about 1 hour a day on average reading the book and solving example questions.

The exam is not hard if you have a lot of Java experience (I started developing in Java back in 1997 with JDK and 1.0 and Applets...) but it does have a few trick questions. The format is typically: what does this program print, but since "compilation fails" and "an Exception is thrown at Runtime" are almost always among the possible choices you have to look at the code carefully.

Some of the things I learned during the preparation are pretty much useless, like watching out for silly mistakes that modern IDEs, such as Eclipse catch for you immediately as you type the code.

Other questions test your knowledge of corner cases in the language that I've never encountered in my many years of coding, such as whether catch (Exception e) will catch AssertionError or whether this abomination compiles:

long[][] a[] = new long[3][][];

(It does.)

So now I'm certified (I got 90%) and know much more about the java.util.Scanner class than I'll ever need to. :)