I passed my ACE exam,

Adobe Certified Professional

I’m now an Adobe Certified Professional in Flex. Whoohoo!

I’m really chuffed, I scored 86%, and got 100% on the UIComponent section, which is no surprise really, as I do lots of ux work on our current project. Getting to the exam was hilarious. It was on a Sunday and we don’t have a train service on a Sunday, so I planned it precisely: cabs, bus, tube, the lot. 2 hours of travel to get to the examination only to find… I’d gone to the wrong place!!!

I couldn’t believe it, I had just 45 minutes to get to the other side of London. Fortunately, I found a mini cab office next door with a cab driver who was like something from a Jason Staham movie (think “the transporter”). This guy was super cool, and drove like a maniac. I had to use his 10 year old map of London to find the way to the proper examination centre, which made me sooo travel sick, it was unbelievable..

But we got there, and despite me being late and so sick that I had to sit down for 10 minutes, I passed! I have to say it, the exam is quite hard – you need to know a lot of stuff to pass. Here’s a pic of all the notes that I made over the last 3 weeks. If you’re gonna do this, even if you’ve been doing flex for a year or more, I really suggest reading up, for a few reasons:

  • the areas covered by the exam are very diverse,
  • you need precise knowledge of some controls in order to choose between bogus properties, and real properties,
  • It tests you on some of the finer points of framework, such as low level event architecture and the collection and renderer interfaces,
  • best of all – you learn loads by reading up.

I was talking about this last point with a good friend from work, and we both realised that often times, when you’re reading the documentation for the first time, it’s in a more goal-based manner: you want to know how to do that drop in renderer, or how to access the outerdocument, or what’s wrong with your e4x statement. As such, you see things like catching events in the capture phase, or event priorities, and think “that wont solve my problem, I don’t need it”.

Going through the docs in such a methodical, pragmattic way was a total boon. I found loads of interesting things, and I have to say it, some better ways of doing things than I had done.

And that’s pretty much what I was expecting: It was one of my main reasons for doing the Flex Certification: I have a great job, which I love and am very proud of, and I wanted to know that I deserve the role I got, so I figured it was worth doing to make sure I make the grade.

In case you’re going to do the exam, I’ll list what I did to revise:

  • read UML-demystified – there are questions on UML, so brush up if you’re rusty,
  • read Advanced Actionscript 3, with design patterns, particularly the “advanced topics” section,
  • followed all 3 of the excellent lynda 2 videos (ok, I kept my finger on the fast forward button for a lot of it, but there was a lot of good stuff, especially in the FDS series),
  • read AND MADE NOTES ON the flex 2 developers guide from Adobe
  • read programming in Actionscript 3,
  • coded lots of small apps based on things I wasn’t too hot on, which for me in particular was the data management and RPC stuff,
  • installed and played extensively with FDS.

Oh, and when I say made, notes, I mean, old school, uni style notes. I studied the guide, the same way I studied networking, or predicate logic, or bpr at uni. I read about 80% of the manual, and made notes on the lot.

picture of notes

On that note (no pun intended), I strongly recommend, seeing as the exam is multiple choice, that you use a shorthand form to make your notes, and don’t try to remember everything – it’s not possible, there is too much. I saw the note making as more of a loose index, if you catch my drift.. it meant that if I saw any keywords in a question, I could search through my brain for pages of notes that matched that keyword.

As such, I wouldn’t recommend writing full text notes, as you wont learn anything. It’s better to read the stuff, code it and know it, so that you don’t need explanaitons, and just write down the methods, properties, and stlyes, and any saliant points for the area you’re covering. In fact, I knew the majority of stuff already, I just needed the index for the finer properties.

Here’s an example: picture of notes

I am in fact, going to make couple of cheat sheets out of my notes over the next few weeks, on the following areas:

  • Flex events,
  • Flex Data Management Service
  • Flex RPC service,
  • Flex Events

If you want to help with that project just buzz me at georgejcook (put an AT symbol here) google mail dot com

If you got here, searching for info on the exam yourself, good luck!