jun :: realeyes

I found out last week that I had to upgrade my Flex 2 certification to Flex 3, and quickly…my ACI certification was on the line.  Of course this happens when I’m completely swamped and have too many other things to do.  In other words, I needed to pass the exam and do it with very little study time, in other words, after finding out last week, I took the test this afternoon and passed.

So what helped me with getting an 88% on minimal study?

1. I’m an experienced Flex/AIR developer.  Flex/AIR is what I do every day at work and that’s what I’ve been doing since Flex 2 beta.  That being said, if you’re just getting started, “results may vary” if you know what I mean.

2. I downloaded the Adobe Flex 3 with AIR Exam Preparation Guide from the Adobe site. It can be found here.  Basically, I scrolled to the bottom and took the 9 question practice exam to get a feel for what the questions would be like.

3. Over the course of a week I ran each of the three 50 question, and five 25 question practice exams in the Attest simulator once.  Immense kudos to the Attest team.  It’s a great product with a great comprehensive feel, and a very awesome price tag…free!

4. I spent an hour before the test skimming through the Adobe Flex 3 LiveDocs.  An hour goes quick, but the questions I got wrong on the Attest gave me a good idea on what I needed to concentrate on.

5. I got good sleep the night before, visualized myself passing the test, and spend 15 minutes or so before the test thinking of other things and concentrating on slowing my breathing and pulse rate. (I was pretty nervous, I always am)

6. During the test I took my time, read all the answers before jumping to conclusions, and unless I was 100% sure, ruled out all the FAIL ones before deciding which one was the correct.

7. Most importantly, I told myself what I would do for myself if I passed.  In my case today, I took myself out for one of my most favorite and unhealthy burgers in the world, the Big Daddy at Good Times.

Needless to say, success tasted good this afternoon.

Overall, I thought the exam was somewhat challenging in areas and easy in others.  If one really understands the concepts covered during the exam, I think that the resulting certification is at least a good way for someone to get their foot in the door to an interview for a Flex job.

For those wanting to take the exam soon, I can’t disclose any specific details about it.  However, I can say, if you’ve built at least a couple Flex and AIR applications and if you take all the practice tests provided in the Attest simulator and pay attention to what you miss, you’ll have a pretty good idea on what you need to study in more detail.

Now I can relax again until the Flex 4 exam comes out…ugh.

If you are planning on taking the Flex certification, wanting to fill some gaps in your knowledge of Flex, or want to find a cheap alternative or supplement to taking the Certified Instructor-led training, Adobe Flex 2 Training from the Source will deliver. (Btw, clicking on that link will take you to sample chapter excerpts.)

The book content is well organized and consists of a just-in-time learning methodology. You start a chapter and receive a summary of what you will be working on. After that the rest of the chapter is hands-on while offering tidbits of information on new concepts and material as they first make their way into the development during the labs.

As an Adobe Certified Instructor in Flex, reading through this book reminded me of the course materials in the Adobe authorized curriculum, following a similar flow and teaching style. One thing I liked about this book is that even if you had taken the standard authorized training courses – Flex 2: Developing Rich Client Applications and Flex 2: Data and Communications – this book offers material that’s not covered in either of those classes. The bonus is that this additional material is presented in easily digestible chunks with good hands-on labs for reinforcement. Some examples of the value-added material are:

• Lesson 12 – Using Drag and Drop
• Lesson 15 – Using the History Manager
• Lesson 23 – Printing From Flex
• Lesson 24 – Using Shared Objects

Another nice thing about the content in the book is the Tips, Notes, and Cautions scattered about. Tips offer alternate ways to accomplish the task at hand. Notes, add some additional background information not necessary for accomplishing the task but good to know. The Cautions do a good job of letting you know of spots in the labs that may cause you to pull hairs out if you’re not paying attention.

The authors are skilled in discussing advanced concepts accessible to new Flex developers seemingly without even breaking a sweat. One example was during Lesson 10 Creating Custom Components with ActionScript 3.0 – method overriding, chrome, rawChildren, and updateDisplayList().

As far as the labs were concerned, through much of the book you are working through a “Flexgrocer” suite of applications. To me working on an app from start to finish, using each of the new concepts as you go along is a very powerful way to learn the material while realizing the WIIFM’s.

In regard to the print format, all too often I’ll see a tech book with interesting material that’s in a small font and jumbled together without sufficient whitespace…headache and instant turn-off. I thought that this book made good use of typefaces, whitespace and I appreciated the size of the font throughout.

After all this praise, I’m sure you’re wondering if there was anything I didn’t like about the book…there were two things:

1. The lab files were not Flex Projects exported from Flex Builder, instead they were zipfiles with just the source. In other words, it would have been nice if the lab files were an archive file containing a “Training from the Source” Flex Builder workspace with the corresponding lesson projects.

2. Within the chapters themselves, the lab files were not broken into chunks, in other words you couldn’t skip the first lab in a Lesson and start working on the second or third lab in a lesson without running into something being missing or potentially broken. In other words, this book was designed to have someone work a Lesson from start to finish.

Now that I’ve left the negative taste in your mouth, let me remove it by saying, this book is definitely a worthwhile addition to your Flex library.

It is a good supplement to the authorized training, and is excellent study material for the Flex 2 Developer exam. Just to give you an idea, if you look at the topic and objectives in the exam guide, the only thing this book doesn’t really seem to cover is UML or Use Cases…but to be fair I wouldn’t expect it to…

All in all, bravo to Tapper, Boles, Talbot, Elmore, and Labriola. Thanks for the excellent read!

Well…I took the plunge and got certified in Flex. Now that I have, it’s time to give my opinion.

Before proceeding any further, I’ d like to say , if you’ve just read Flex books and haven’t done a lick of code…don’t even bother with this exam.

Also, if you’ve written a lot of code and haven’t spent too much time in the help docs or any Flex books, I would say that it would definitely not hurt to at least do some skimming. You’ll know when you’re successful with skimming when you notice yourself saying, “oh yeah forgot about that one” or “wow, I’ve never seen or used that before”

I’ve taken plenty of vendor certs before (MCSE 4.0, CFMX 7, etc.) and would have to say that my impression of the exam is that it was well rounded, not too inaccessible, and had a good question/time ratio. In other words, I got through the questions without feeling rushed and while I was reviewing the ones I had marked for review, the session timed out. Best word of advice is not to dilly-dally on the questions you’re not sure on.

As far as the content in the exam, all I have to say is that it was well rounded. In the test you’re dealing with UML, J2EE, FDS, Charting, AS3, MXML, OOP, Software Architecture, and anything else Flex you can think of. (Reference Topic areas and objectives in the Prep Guide) The Flex product line is huge, the Framework is gi-normous, and having to worry about software architecture, OOP, and actual AS3 coding practices All I have to say is bravo to Adobe on the breadth of the question pool.

So…if I haven’t scared you from taking the test, here are my recommendations:

1. No joke, make sure you are comfortable with every bullet in the exam prep guide

2. Write some apps, c’mon people.

3. Take some training

4. If training is not an opportunity for you, then definitely check out Adobe Press book Adobe Flex 2 Training from the Source I COMPLETELY agree on this one with both Daniel and Angus good job guys, thanks for the tip!

5. Actually, skimming through the Training from the Source book and taking a note of the tips, section heading blurbs, and code examples is a good refresher even if you had a chance to train. (Btw, the link in #4 above will take you to four downloadable chapter excerpts)

6. Grab a copy of the detailed exam specs. Everyone referred to it in their blog, but I could not find a downloadable version of the pdf…however, being the cool search engine that Google is, I did get a hold of a cached HTML copy…

[JCH: Updated 3/19/08 START] http://office.realeyesmedia.com/blogs/jun/samples/certification/Flex20Blueprint.htm 

[JCH: Updated 3/19/08 END]

7. Go for it!

Anyway, hope this is helpful to someone…let’s get Flexified ya’ll!