In my previous post I’ve promised to do some posts covering my preparation to 98-375 exam, but it turned out that I didn’t find time to do any. Sadly I’m unable to allocate time for writing here on any topics lately, and it is not that there is nothing to write about, it’s just lack of time 🙂 For example there are rather a lot of interesting stuff going on in K2 space, yet I haven’t write anything on this topic for quite some time now.
Anyhow as I passed 98-375 exam I would do a little entry about this. Here you havee my results:
Some thoughts on that now. For preparation I’ve used the following resources:
- “Preparing for Exam 98-375: HTML5 App Development Fundamentals” set of videos on MSDN Channel 9
- Various LinkedIn learning courses (mostly those which are included into “Become a Web Developer” track)
- MeasureUP practice test for exam 98-375 exam
Now a little bit about these exam preparation resources. Channel 9 videos are very good as they provide complete exam overview and available for free. It is not all you need to pass the exam but watch them carefully (and maybe a few times) and you will learn not only how is this exam, but some practical things you will be definitely tested on.
LinkedIn videos are great too, but you really need to watch them more than once and do practice labs or try things you learn about otherwise knowledge retention will be weak. At the very least you want to do a 2 pass with most of the course – 1st just watch and get a broad picture, 2nd to absorb it really slowly and pay attention to details. To access these materials you have to have paid subscription, but comparing its price tag with some other training options or even books price is more than acceptable.
Lat but not least, MeasureUP practice test. It costs 88 EUR, and for this specific exam practice test content can be criticized a bit. In my opinion: 1) Content has not been updated at all since exam release. Result: 60% of links in question explanations are changed does not work (hey MeasureUP, seriously, that type of updates does not require a big investment on your side, why not invite something to do a review? I can do it in exchange for some preparation materials access 🙂 ). 2) There are some obvious typos in the test. 3) Depressingly high number of questions revolving around Windows Phone and IE10 specifics. In fact I didn’t have any of those on the exam and after taking it it feels that unlike MeasureUP practice test, exam content was updated 🙂
On my results. I’ve scored with 76 points (70 is passing threshold), and, in spite of all my complains on MeasureUP practice test content quality it was instrumental in passing exam. Even if we ignore ALM and JavaScript domains, HTML and CSS topics give you just enormous amount of things and behavioral peculiarities on which you potentially can be tested, and having some specific questions touching on all these little things really helped. I feel that practice test questions bank didn’t contain enough CSS questions (it had only 25) and my result clearly reflects that. Though I obviously don’t count me as an any kind of expert in JavaScript, I do recognize that CSS is something I need to learn more which clearly reflected in exam score.
All in all, I’m satisfied with this exam and can recommend it to anyone who want to add some sort of goal/milestone to their entry web development learning journey – good entry level exam allowing you to learn and verify knowledge of basic components of web development and get more confidence to plan next steps on that route.
What’s next? I’m going to “relax a bit” taking 2 or more Microsoft Exams related to SQL Server (more about this in next posts), and once I’m done with that I will do a “full fledged” version of 98-375 exam, i.e. 70-480 Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3.