Adventures in Certification: The Journey Begins

At a certain point in your career you may realize that you've specialized on accident, so you may as well "cert up" and go with it.

That was my exact situation, so after a bit of study found out that the Java starting certification is currently (Jan 2013) the Java SE 7 Certification.  Achieving this bestows the title of Oracle Certified Associate (OCA) Java SE 7 (aka OCAJ).  The old Java 6 equivalent appears to still be called a Sun certification, so that caused me some confusion that I hope to spare the reader.  Achieving the cert involves passing the 1Z0-803 exam, and this goes for under $500 USD so it's relatively reasonable given how much the further certs go for.

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How to prepare was a bit vexing as well; an initial Googling of the exam number revealed a few scammy websites at first, the following sites all have poor reviews or prominent ripoffreport rankings: selftestengine.com (self test engine review), actualtests.com(actualtests reviews), pass4sure.com (pass4sure reviews) & realtests.com (realtests reviews).  You DO want to pick up a book on it.  I'm going through the OCA Java SE 7 Programmer I Study Guide by McGraw Hill just to brush up on the basics again.

Lastly, on a different note I'm making the plunge into freelancing, so I finally had to break and put in AdSense ads.  I hope that people find this informative and thanks for reading!