How did you prepare for the Sun Certified Java Developer (SCJD) certification?

Question

Title pretty much says it all. For obvious reasons, I'm only interested in your answer if you passed.

EDIT: While I appreciate the comments about the SCJP exam, I am asking about the SCJD, which is administered in a very different fashion from the SCJP.

EDIT 2: Comments on the value of certifications are also not useful. My question assumes that you've already decided you want the certification, and asks how to prepare for it.

Answer 1

Robert,

as the other members I'm SJCP certified, it's not very commom to find SCJD certified people.

But my approach was reading the Kathy Sierra book and answering Test Killer simulates, which give me a lot of questions that are on the exam. You can find the simulates on internet forums and I think they are the best study source.

Answer 2

I worked through two Tutorials:

1. The Swing Tutorial (especially the table parts)
2. The RMI Tutorial

And I had a good look at the java.lang.reflect.Proxy class to use it in my architectural design.

That's about it, I don't think you need to prepare more than that if you have a basic Java know-how.

Answer 3

Go buy this book ASAP SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 6 Exam 310-065 by Sierra and Bates. I used this book to study and passed pretty easily. The authors wrote the certification test and provide more than enough examples to help you prepare.

Edit: I just read your question closely and I totally answered for the SCJP exam. However, the book I mentioned in my answer does have coverage of the SCJD exam. From what I have read, you basically just have to justify your design/implementation of the assigned project. One of my professors in college gave us a sample SCJD project for our final project and it wasn't too difficult. I would just make sure you have a very good understanding of OOAD an design patterns.