Spring 3 course and certification tips

After attending the SpringSource course last February, today I passed the Spring Core 3 certification exam, with a score of 92%. I 'm writing this article to share my experience.

My first intention was to achieve the certification without attending the VMWare course, using the so called "grandfather voucher"... unfortunately such a voucher is no more recognized by Springsource, so the only way was to attend an official SpringSource course.

The course

The course was definitely worth it, the teacher (Joris Kuipers) was great: very prepared, engaging and pleasant. I bothered him with many questions, he always answered in a quick and accurate way :D
Despite the many course subjects, we covered all of them without being in a rush, the course material and the labs are really good and useful (I'm still using it as a reference), we were provided with a perfectly working and configured STS environment.

The preparation

I know it's very hard to find resources on the internet to prepare this exam (I'm referring to mock exams of course).

The resources I've actually used are the following:

• Jeanne Boyarsky's experiences ans study notes


• Gavin Lasnitzki's notes (it's an extension of Jeanne's notes)


• SkillGuru mock test 1


• Skill guru mock test 2


• Skill guru mock test 3


• BlackBeltFactory mock test 1

Many other links and useful advices are available in Jeanne's and Gavin's webistes.

My Study Notes

As the trainer said, the most valuable resource to prepare the certification exam is the course slides, they cover all the subjects of the certification... but in my opinion some study is still required. What I did is integrating the
Gavin notes with all the missing stuff taken from the course slides, obtaining my final version of Spring Study Notes, which you can download here. Thanks a lot to Jeanne and Gavin for their efforts, my preparation has been much faster and easier because of them!!

The exam

The exam duration is 88 minutes, 50 questions and 76% passing score, I completed it in about 40 minutes (including review).  In my opinion, the questions average difficulty is not so different than the SkillGuru/BlackBeltFactory mock tests linked above (BTW take into consideration
that they contain a lot of questions regarding subjects out of the course/exam scope). I think that a VERY good understanding of the IoC container, Spring AOP and Transaction Management is required to pass the exam, all the other subjects are less covered compared to these two. Also understanding the dynamic proxying mechanism used by Spring AOP under the hood will help a lot. What I can advice is to check the Spring 3 Reference Documentation in case of any doubts, it helped me a lot.

Good luck!