Studying and passing the AWS Developer Associate Exam

Amazon Web Services has been around for over a decade now and has offerings that continue to grow. They also have over a 35% market share.  Lastly the Developer Associate exam seems to come up on "best programmer certs" type of posts (e.g. here).

So if you're convinced that it's a good idea to get a cert, how do you do it?  What should you study?  No one wants to waste a day and over a hundred dollars to take a test and then fail it.  This post will go over some of the best resources to use to study.

When I studied for the exam and passed it, these were the most useful resources, in order:

1. ACloudGuru has a fantastic series of videos that covers everything on the test is broad strokes, but is detailed enough to give you a real advantage on the test.  The training isn't free but it is quite reasonable and you literally get hours of content.
2. The AWS Documentation will have the details you need, but usually in a format geared for your day-to-day developer work instead of in a Q/A format.
3. On-the-job experience is great too.  However experience will usually have you do a deep-dive on one or two technologies (e.g. migrate something to EC2 and S3) instead of a broad overview of the entire platform.  This overview is what the test is going to be about.
4. The AWS FAQs have some information and are in a good Q/A format, but rarely mention anything on the test.
5. The AWS Whitepapers are recommended on Amazon's page of test tips, but was not really useful at all.  You would probably be better prepared by reading the Wikipedia page's list of AWS services.

The test itself was in a bit of an odd location.  When I took it the facility was primarily used for aviation testing.  Needless to say, when you're waiting in line with people needing pilot's licenses you wonder if you got the address wrong.  So don't worry if you get directed to an airport, or near one.  Also, at my location only two other people were taking the test and I was expecting more of a classroom like situation (e.g. 15+ people taking the test at the same time).  Overall, the experience wasn't that bad.  The questions mostly matched up with the preparation questions from ACloudGuru but not entirely.

Lastly, some companies will pay for your tests and training.  If you're really lucky you'll be with a company that needs a certain headcount of certified developers in order to qualify to be some kind of "premium partner" with AWS.

All in all, it required a fair chunk of time to study but you end up with a really good overview of the (now large) AWS ecosystem of services as well as a boost to your resume.

Adventures in Certification & New Ads

There is a great forum topic about the Oracle Certified Associate, Java test over at DreamInCode that gives a good overview of what to expect.

Also expect subtle ads from VigLink (see icon) from here on in when I blatantly plug products like encouraging people to not pirate their Adobe software.

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!

Something Important Happened

I just caught on the eetimes that there is a new software engineering certification.  What makes this a big deal is that it's by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying, something that has an actual track record.

The test info is also on their site, look for "Software" in the list.  As the recent spat on Yahoo's CEO demonstrated, there isn't currently an equivalent of the engineering certifications in software.  This may change that.

This may prove to be pivotal for the field of Software Engineering / Programming / Whatever we call it.