FJ-310

Well... I'm halfway through my java course, "Developing Applications with Java EE", taught by Philip Seymour. He's doing a bang-up job considering. This is a Sun Microsystems course hosted at QA:IQ's office in Tabernacle St, London. There are 14 (or maybe 15?) of us crammed into room 102 on the first floor, where we're trying somehow to cover this huge subject in 5 days. We have Sun Solaris boxes to do this on, which are pretty much museum pieces - unlike the speed machines we had at Eclectic in Glasgow for my SL-275 course, these guys run Netbeans 5.5 (not the 6.0 latest version) on a 500MHz CPU. Yeah, seriously. 500MHz for Sun Application Server, Netbeans 5.5 & Solaris 10 with a Gnome front-end instead of CDE. It's a case of click, wait, go make a coffee, return, oh, it's updated at last! Meanwhile, poor old Philip has to cover all the modules in time, but if you look at the textbook, there's a LOT to the subject matter that isn't being mentioned. Blink & you'll miss it. I'm 2 practical modules behind, largely because we've twice the students we had in Glasgow & unlike BEA Systems' courses, the labs don't tell you every button click you need.
This is actually quite a good thing in some respects, as it forces you to think, and when you notice the labs being almost purposefully vague, the chances are that somewhere in the immense spiral bound text that you've at best skim-read, there's something that actually tells you what to do. As Philip says, it's not something to get depressed about as you're meant to cover the labs at your own pace, and I'm studying in some cases with people who've already been developing JSPs, EJBs etc for a while, but I'm beginning to despair of getting it all done. What you need isn't just the labs & time to do them at home, but the instructor there & able to answer all your questions - but with such a huge class it'd be impossible for everyone to get a look-in. This isn't a complaining post, at least not 100% - Philip Seymour has so far delivered the magisterial portions of the course in a humourous & engaging style, and he's done his best to explain things in terms of design patterns we can make use of in our professional careers, so we'll be starting with some useful knowledge, but there Just Isn't Time to learn all this to the level where I'll be comfortable with it, not in a week. I can see myself over the next 2 years re-covering all the course material - not 2 years for just this course, but for the 2 other courses I've done lately.
I'm going to spend the next few weeks cramming, mind-mapping & experimenting with the material covered in Fj-310. I think I may need to do 315, the JSP & Servlet course, which apparently goes into a lot more detail about JSPs & Servlets.