Yesterday I took the Adobe Flex Certification exam.  I did pretty well and passed, so I thought I’d share the resources I used to study:

http://partners.adobe.com/public/en/ace/ACE_Exam_Guide_Flex2.pdf
This will give you a brief intro to the exam, a few ideas of where to start your studying, and a short sample of questions to get you into the testing rhythm.  The questions on there are a fairly good representation of what you might find on the exam.

http://office.realeyesmedia.com/blogs/jun/samples/certification/Flex20Blueprint.htm
This does a good job of breaking down all the topics that might show up on the exam.  It would be helpful to look through the various items and focus on your particular weaknesses.

http://www.lynda.com/
Lynda.com was invaluable to understanding Flex Data Services.  If you haven’t used FDS, this will give you a good idea of its abilities, how to implement each component, how to set up the server, etc.  Even if you’ve used FDS, you may have found yourself copying basic architecture code from one project to another.  It wouldn’t hurt to freshen up.  You can sign up for a week-long trial (usually they’re 24-hour trials) if you head over to this address: http://www.lynda.com/deke.

http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Flex-2-Training-Source/dp/032142316X
I’m too cheap and digital to purchase this book on my own, but my work already had it so I thought I’d give it a read.  It ended up being a nice way to get a brief review of the various Flex topics.  A lot of times picking through stuff online only leads you to topics you’re interested in or can think of off the top of your head.  By flipping through a book like this from front to back, you can make sure you cover your bases.  Also, I don’t know that this is the best book option, it’s just what I had immediately available.  I did think it was well-written though.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/langref/
This is the language reference that, if you’re a Flex developer, you probably sift through every day.  This is the Flex 2 version to match the exam.  Think of some of the functions where you generally would rely on code completion.  Look up their actual signatures to get a little more familiar with them. I definitely wouldn’t spend a lot of time on this since the possibility of what Adobe can test on is so varied.

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=98144&seqNum=6
http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/articles/umlClassDiagrams.pdf
I briefly read these to freshen up on basic UML (yes, there’s UML on the exam.)

Finally, practice.  If you haven’t even cracked open Flex Builder, don’t mess with the exam.  While you could memorize everything and still pass, your head will explode first (you’ll also look stupid having a certification and not knowing what you’re doing.) Experience allows you to innately know when something looks right or wrong and you can spare the memorizing as much as possible.

Good luck!  If anyone else has tips or tricks to studying for the exam, please share in the comments below.

Tags: certification, exam, Flex, study

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 4th, 2008 at 11:45 am and is filed under Flex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.