I have been planning to write SCEA 1 (Sun Certified Enterprise Architect) certification for last couple months, finally started preparing for it late November. I started with Design Patterns by Head First. Nice read, very entertaining, I highly recommend this book. Next, borrowed UML distilled from Local library. I like this book for the reason that it is very small and concise, gives you basics of UML. As expected EJB is major part of the certification, best place to read specifications is SUN’s website.
One more resource that helped me was Sun Certified Enterprise Architecture for J2EE Technology Study Guide (Sun Microsystems Press). This book contains UML, EJB, Pattern, Security etc all in one place.
I scheduled my exam on Monday 3.00pm so I get whole weekend before the exam to review important topics. There were 48 questions in the exam and I got 43 correct. One word of advise though, try to get as many answers correct as possible on the first pass itself even if takes few seconds more per question than you planned. Make sure you answer all the questions in the first pass. I was expecting to have more time at the end to review few questions I wasn’t sure of, but I ended up having only 2 minutes (2nd pass) to review 18 questions before time was up.
I used following resources.
1. Head First Design Patterns
2. UML Distilled
3. EJB specifications
4. Sun Certified
5. http://nicky.cust.ipeer.se/moelholmweb/pages/mocks/mocks_scea.xml
6. http://www.geocities.com/subra_73/SCEA_Practice_Questions.htm
