After our weeks and weeks of training and some hands-on experience, some of us at Resource are looking into the ATG Certification exams. The ATG site has a sample quiz to see if you’re ready for certification. This quiz is a great starting point, as it showcases the type of questions that will be asked, offers feedback on the correct responses and points the visitor to the appropriate reference material. I’ve decided to use this sample quiz as the structure of the study guide I’m creating. The actual exam overview document provided by ATG goes into much more detail, obviously, but this will be a starting point.

This will be something I’ll be doing as I have time, and I will post the link to it from here.

I took the Java 2 Developers Exam back in 2003, the same month I finished my coursework for my Bachelor’s degree in Digital Communication. I’d taken several courses in java (the language itself as well as client-server programming), purchased a certification prep guide, and went for it! I passed, got my sheet of paper and have barely touched java since.

Now I have my sights set on the Flex 2 Developer Exam. As a newer technology, there aren’t all the online tests and prep guides that there were for java. I am enrolled in a training course now, but I don’t know that I will attend any further courses. This is obviously going to be a self-driven effort!

I am at the stage right now where with my Flex hammer, everything looks like a nail. I am looking for every opportunity to use flex, but I know I need to keep in mind its strengths and benefits. My portfolio is incredibly outdated (I created in during a 6 week course during that same undergrad program mentioned above), but I don’t know that it’s ‘rich’ enough to warrant developing in flex. I was also thinking about developing my own prep guide for the certification exam in flex, but before embarking on that, I want to ensure it really is an appropriate format. Certainly it would give me some more experience using flex, but I don’t know if a study guide is really a) an application, b) rich. I will have to think about this some more..

After a slow start, I am now well-immersed in flex training. Our instructor missed his flight into town the first morning, so started a good 2.5 hours late. However, we students in the class spent some time on our own discussing what we understood, and I think overall that was a valuable exercice. There is really nothing like explaining something to someone to see how well you understand it.

I enrolled in the “Developing Rich Internet Applications” but I think I may have been better off enrolling in a more advanced class. I had already done plenty of reading and playing around, as opposed to some students who had no knowledge of flex at all.

I have been doing some more research on Flex Certification and I expect I will be pursuing it. I managed to find a fair amount of information on Jun Heider’s blog. Although the timing isn’t ideal (I’m about to start two more courses for grad school this week!), I am going to work towards certification before the end of 2007.

• go through and make study notes based on the Flex2Blueprint Jun posted.
• subscribe to Lynda.com training for one month, watch the videos
• Ideally I’d like to take the “Programming the Visual Experience” training class, but I’m not sure if that will work out.

I will continue posting my progress on this as I go along–