Sun certified Java Programmer

Yesterday I went to the Prometric testing site here in Austin to take my Sun certified Java Programmer Java SE 6.0 exam. After more than 3 hours of counting parenthesis and trying lure pitfalls and traps out of small pieces of Java code I hit the "end" button and a test report was printet. I went out of the testing room and was handed the test report which showed that I passed, hurray! :)

So now I am officially good at writing Java code. This might seem like a joke especially since I have spent quite some time studying programming language at large and written a substantial number of lines of Java code. Even so I must admit that I have learned quite a bit about Java during the preparation for the exam. This surprised my at first, but then I noticed that I only use a rather well defined subset of Java and didn't think that much about the rest of the language, because I didn't need that :) Well so I thought, but I have learnt some new stuff, and even some of it that I can put into good use when I write my next Java class. So studying for these kinds of exams can have some value. And then it is fun to dig out the corner cases and understand how the various parts fit together :)