Passed S90.01 SOA exam!

I was looking up different options for SOA related certifications and I came across the site soacp (www.soacp.com) and soaschool (www.soaschool.com). The SOACP is a vendor-neutral program developed in cooperation with Thomas Erl, the well known SOA author and several major SOA organizations.

The thing I really liked about their certifications is that they are vendor neutral, which to me means that you can apply the information across all vendors equally without being tied down to either IBM or Sun or whatever.  Which is the essence of SOA after all!

They have several different tracks for SOA certifications and I am keen on the Certified SOA Architect track. You have to complete 2 exams to gain the Certified SOA Professional certificate and a further 3 exams for the Certified SOA Architect one.

So I started with the very first exam S90.01. This exam is required for all tracks. I passed it with 96% which I am really pleased about, considering I studied seriously for less than 2 days! 

If you do a search you won’t find much details about these exams.  Which I found made it slightly difficult to guage if I’m ready or not to take the exam especially since there are no ‘sample tests’ to be found anywhere.  So I thought it may be useful to others who are also pursuing this exam if I shared some information about the first exam and how I prepared for it etc.

Firstly as you’ll find on the sites above, the S90.01 exam tests you on your grasp of SOA concepts. You can either buy the study guides from the site or get the related book by Thomas Erl – SOA:Principles of Service Design.

The study guide is mostly a concise view of what is in the book. Relevant chapters in the book for this exam are 3, 4, 6, 16 and Appendix B.  Understand the concepts really well, don’t just memorize. You need to understand the what and the why, more than the how at this point.  Important things to understand are the different elements of SOA including services, service orientation etc, SOA goals, characteristics and principles, what it helps solve and impacts of going the SOA way and technologies you can use for implementing SOA based services.  One thing that I found really helped was actually listening to the Audio CDs that are part of the study guides.  This is especially useful when you do not find time to actually read like when driving to work!

The exam is relatively easy once you know the concepts. Honestly!

Next up for me is exam S90.02 which will earn me the Certified SOA Professional certification.I have already got the study guides and related book for the exam.  Now all I need to do is start preparing. 

I’ll keep you posted!