ColdFusion 9 ACE PrepKit Review
I've been trying out the ColdFusion 9 ACE PrepKit from UCertify. A few years back I did my ColdFusion 8 ACE exam (and passed!), but haven't updated it for ColdFusion 9. With ColdFusion 10 around the corner now seemed like a good opportunity to renew my ACE before a whole bunch of new stuff in Zeus needed to be learnt.
UCertify kindly gave me an evaluation licence, but I did notice that UCertify state on their website that "You will pass your exam in the first attempt or we will refund your money in full" - I've not had to test this out (yet!), but it seems like a pretty good deal.
When you get the licence you need to download and install the software on your machine. Only Windows is supported, which was a small annoyance as I use Ubuntu on my laptop at home, however there is an online version (which is currently in beta) at https://learn.ucertify.com/, although I haven't tried it.
So is it any good?
Things I didn't like:
The interface and navigation of the software is a bit clunky, but you soon get used to it. In fairness the interface used in the exam isn't exactly slick so you could say this is good preparation for the exam conditions!
Some of the questions need to be reviewed occasionally their are some grammatical errors which make the questions hard to read.
A couple of questions made no sense at all to me, I really think UCertify could greatly improve this software by getting a ColdFusion developer involved in the question development.
The majority of the questions are multiple choice, which is the same as the actual CF8 ACE exam. However, there are a few questions where you are required to type in the missing words. You must enter the exact answer otherwise it marks it as an incorrect answer. The answer is case sensitive and can be one or more words. For example I answered "regular expressions" for one question and it was marked as incorrect as the correct answer is "Regular expressions". I don't know if the ColdFusion 9 ACE exam has this type of question, I would hope not as it is very hard for the candidate to get this right, even if they know the answer.
It's Windows only (as I mentioned above). Not a big deal for me as I use Windows at work.
What I did like:
There are areas of ColdFusion that I simply don't use so have limited or no knowledge of; taking the PrepKit is good at highlighting these areas. The software has a nice learning / review system which means that you can revisit the questions you got wrong and it will tell you what the correct answer should have been and also why.
The review section gives you the correct answer as well as explaining what each of the other answer options are for. A further link is also provided to the Adobe Coldfusion documentation for a further study.
You can choose to "learn" whilst taking the practice exams, which is useful when you really have no idea what the answer is and would otherwise be guessing.
There are plenty of questions and it remembers how you did on each test between sessions, you can also add notes and rate questions, although I didn't find this part of the software particularly useful.
In Conclusion:
With some input from a few seasoned ColdFusion developers, UCertify could turn this into a great bit of software. As it is I'd say that if you want to ensure that you pass your ACE then this is well worth looking at. You can download a trial version from the website and see how you get on with it before spending your hard earned cash.
More Information:
http://www.ucertify.com/certifications/Adobe/ace-coldfusion9.html
http://www.ucertify.com/download/9A0-127.html
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- ColdFusion
- Reviews
