IT Certification

I was asked to reorganized the help documentation again. The product is a constantly evolving and drastic changes are an all too common occurrance. I have spent most of my time serving as a tester because I keep finding bugs. Even during product demonstration meetings, something crashes and the meeting is quickly derailed. It has been very difficult to keep the perspective of the user.

I’ve purchased a copy of Head First Design Patterns in my continuing search for knowledge of Java and Object Oriented Programming. I’ve only read the first few pages but I notice that what I have read, I actually remember it and I look forward to reading more. I went ahead and ordered the Head First Java, 2nd edition and the Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design: A Brain Friendly Guide to OOA&D. I didn’t intend to go on a book buying spree but I have felt strongly to go ahead and make the plunge. I read a few pages from the Head First Java and I was hooked. It just seems to make sense.

Since I have continued to look at other sources for learning Java, I notice my attention is drawn to some sources and not others.

I recently purchased a license for Whizlab’s SCJP 5.0 exam simulator. The simulator provides a boost to exam preparation by presenting questions in a format that mimics the SCJP exam format. I took the diagnostic exam in two parts and found it overwhelming which is basically why I purchased this program. The test is intimidating if it is anything like the test. I learned later that the diagnostic is actually harder then the real test. It seems that these  test prep programs overwhelm you and then desensitize you to the test conditions. After I recovered, the exam did motivate me to study harder and infused some new enthusiasm for learning and mastering object oriented programming.

I got my first exposure to PHP script yesterday. It all started with my inquiry into how a user would create an Enterprise account on ContractPal. A new account process is a little bit convoluted. This question led to another question that led to an opportunity to expand my skill set. I received an assignment to create an “opportunity assessment” page and add it to the company web site.

The form will ask a visitor for some contact information and some questions about their needs, e.g. how many transactions; how much time to close a transaction. The submitted form will be forwarded to his email address. He can then use the information to followup.

I learned that we are using a content management system called MODx. I explored the user interface and found some help documentation. I soon found myself looking at PHP code in a sample code snippet called ‘Web Lead’. It contains a simple form that a user can fill out. Now, I need to add some additional questions with radio buttons and figure out how to send the form via email. I visited W3Schools to get started learning it. It turns out that PHP is very similar to JavaScript and the RhinoScript that I have learned developing Pals for ContractPal.

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I found some interesting blogs today and one of them led me to discover the Java Language Specification. As a technical writer I am very interested in reading about API. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed reading this specification. It reveals many insights into whys and hows for creating Java. I quote from the introduction, “It is intended to be a production language, not a research language, and so, as C. A. R.
Hoare suggested in his classic paper on language design, the design has avoided including new and untested features.” The book was available for download as a pdf and contains 684 pages.

I passed the Java SE basic test today. I persevered and succeeded. I attempted the test about 6 times before I passed it. Onward and upward! Now I will prepare to challenge Sensai for my orange belt; Namaste.

I studied the Sun Javadocs collections today. There are 9 different interfaces for handling collections of objects. I still studying chapter 3 of Sierra Bates book on Java Certification.

I took the object oriented test and passed! I gained 3 points toward a yellow belt. I was surprised that I passed because most of the questions seemed so difficult. I am still struggling with casting and inheritance.

The objectives and questions contain general Java programming elements to test Object Oriented concepts. The exams are made up of questions that have gone through a beta testing process by other users. As each user votes on a question, it is included in the real exam after enough votes are submitted by other users to merit it. Questions that are not appropriate for the exam level or have other difficulties go into a repair zone for rewrite and then are reintroduced into the beta portion of the test site. Each test has an exam moderator that reviews questions and has the final say in whether questions are inserted into the ‘real exam’ question base.

I have contributed by writing comments suggesting corrections to grammatical errors and misspellings. These tests are useful because they are helping me to prepare for the real test. I get nervous in tests. It also gives me code snippets to experiment with and gives me a direction to read the Javadocs for concepts that I’m not familiar. I still haven’t passed the Java SE basic exam yet. I take beta tests, read the SCJP Certification book, read Sun’s Javadocs and review Sun’s Java tutorials.

I continue to make the rounds each day visting JavaBlackBelt and Examulator. I have talked about my goal to learn Java and developers have recommended that I create an application. One of my friends recommended creating a “mad lib” application.

Requirements

1. Read a file and display a paragraph of text.
2. Insert words read from a file, insert the words where needed and display it.
3. Add a user input to dynamically insert content.
4. Add Junit code to test your code.

Do I feel overloaded? You bet. We all have different roles derived from our relationships with each other. At work I’m told what to do; at home, I’m managing the well being of my family. Overloading a method means to use the same name as a method in a parent class and rearranging the order or changing the number of parameters passed into the method.

Ever had a decision overriden? I ask Dave a question about ContractPal (we have 3 Daves at work). Depending on which Dave I ask, determines what kind of answer I will get to my question. Each Dave is a competent programmer and has a work title with ‘developer’ in it. One Dave specializes in writing low level back end code, Dave two is a wiz at front-end technologies like Ajax and Dave three is an enterprise architect making sure everything works together. An overrided method will have the same name and parameters as its super class (parent) but its function is modified: it does something different. Java differentiates between parent and child methods using the this.method and super.method to differentiate the overrided methods just like I use a last name to differentiate between Dave A. and Dave M. and Dave W.

Ok, so here I am staring at a wall again… I have wandered into javaBlackbelt and got my butt kicked. I’ve tried taking the “basic” Java SE test and failed twice with the same score of 50%. I keep finding that I’ve forgotten another yet “basic” fact about Java. The climb up the wall seems a bit tedious but I’m going over things again. It seems that I will not forget now that Constructors are named after the class it will ‘construct’, that it can use any access modifier including private. It can be chained together–wow, what a concept. Sometimes, my study of Java blows me away. Why did I ever think I could document code? Oh yeah, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Thank you Sensei, can I have my butt kicked again? Yasa! and everything spins out of control. Confidence? Well, I’ve got to pay the price–keep pushing.