SCJP Notecards
For a test this big every strategy needs to be looked into. Note cards are a very easy way to separate all the junk in a paragraph from what you really need to know, but they can be very time consuming to make. Luckily the SCJP book I have lists everything you need to know at the end of each chapter. When I made my note cards (almost a year ago) I wrote each bullet on it's own note card and on the other side I put the reference. When I had time, I would go over the note cards for a chapter and pick out the ones that I didn't understand completely. This way I knew what I had to look for in each chapter in order to fully understand it. Making the note cards was a lot of work and I'm not sure that it helped that much. Sure, writing things down helps put it through the brain in a different way but it seems more like a chore than actual learning. This time around I think I may use flash cards.
Does anyone think that flash cards could work? A flash card has a question on the front and the answer on the back. It's kind of hard to make flash cards for an exam this big so I'm not sure it's worth the effort. A flash card may also be too simple to represent everything that can be put into a question on the exam. Of course, there are concepts that need to be memorized that are not in code like abstraction, polymorphism and inheritance. Flash cards could even be used to memorize keywords. While I'm reading the SCJP book again I will make some flash cards for the first chapter and see if it helps.
In other news I'm getting rid of my theme. It doesn't work at all in IE and I'm just getting tire of worrying about the layout. I may work on customizing a different theme but for now I'm going with the Basic theme that came with roller.