Looking for my exam summary? Jump straight to it! Want to know more? Keep reading…
Last year I published my study plan for the 70-513 Microsoft exam (“study log” would’ve been more appropriate), which helped me pass the exam (without cheating by using brain dumps) with just under 200 hours of study time. This time I’m going for the 70-480 exam (html5, JavaScript, and css3), and I’ve decided to use an actual plan. When I started rolling up this plan, there were a few premises.
First up: the date for my exam is already set. I will probably not be able to spend a full 200 hours on the subject matter before planning my exam. The plan will have to scale with the amount of time I will turn out to have available. Anyways, given that the exam was free of charge, it’s not as big a deal if I don’t pass it.
Secondly, the subject matter for 70-480 is not entirely new to me, as was the case with the 70-513 (WCF) exam. So, my plan would be okay even if it omits more general prose about the subjects and sticks to the details of objectives. I’m not sure how this will affect my chances. I’m hoping my existing knowledge make things easier, but at the same time I’m afraid that it won’t…
Finally, and most imporantly, I figured that reviewing the exam objectives very carefully should be enough. Because the exam is brand new, there is no official study guide, nor are there any books specifically aimed at the exam. I was hoping to piggyback on someone else’s summary, but given that I couldn’t find any decent one, I decided to create my own.
The Plan
So here are the steps I’m taking to study for this exam:
- Create an overview of all exam objectives.
- Find links for all objectives (at least one, preferably two or more per objective), from various sources:
- The relevant spec.
- The W3 wiki, if applicable.
- MDN (my personal favorite source for most web development topics).
- MSDN (it’s a Microsoft exam, after all).
- jQuery (Microsoft’s gambling hard on this library, it seems).
- Miscellaneous other sources (DiveIntoHtml5, Stack Overflow, etc)
- Review all objectives by reading through the linked pages.
So far I’m pretty happy with the result. If you want to piggyback on my 70-480 summary: be my guest! It looks something like this:
Creating the list and digging up all the links took a few nights work, all done over the course of the previous two weeks. Next up: two weeks of reviewing these objectives, followed by the exam itself.
Wish me luck!