A few days ago I passed the exam for becoming Adobe Certified Expert in Flex 4.5. Now I want to share my experience about the exam.

1. A little background

Because most of my working experience is in ColdFusion and PHP, I approached Flex more like a hobby. I wanted to have a better grip of the RIA concept and event-driven architecture. I started to use it also in real life, but it’s only 3 months ago when I started the preparation for the exam.
I read two Flex 4 books (both published in November 2010):

1. “Learning Flex 4: Getting Up to Speed with Rich Internet Application Design and Development” by Alaric Cole, Elijah Robison [#]
2. “Flex 4 in Action” Tariq Ahmed, Dan Orlando, John C. Bland II, and Joel Hooks[#]

While the first one provided a quick-and-easy approach to Flex, the second one came to consolidate my overall Flex knowledge. I recommend them both, preferably in the same order.
Aside from the books above, the Livedocs where always the reference. The problem was that I had to switch from ActionScript documentation, to Flex 4.5, to AIR, and even data services livedocs. Making sure that I am always reading the latest version was a concern, as Google sometimes shows first the old resources (AS 2, Flex 3, etc).

2. Preparing for the exam

After reading and reviewing the two books above (I keep Google Docs notes :)), I bought the Attest 3 exam engine. I learned a surprisingly lot more from there, especially in the AIR and design patterns sections, barely covered in the books. The links to the Livedocs were quite helpful, even though they were pointing to the Flex 3 version and I had to manually switch to the latest Flex version. My test results started from about 70%, and got up as the questions started to repeat (they say the total number of questions is 200+).
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It’s sparkling! Weee… 🙂

More details to follow here!

In the latest months I’ve been doing some research in Flex, to have better understanding of the RIA, event-driven development. Well, there was also an interest in AMF, AIR, mobile applications, and so on. And because I needed an extra motivation for that, I planned to take the Adobe Flex certification exam. Adobe Developer Connection provided a quick overview of the exam, and the Adobe official exams page shows the Adobe® Flex 4 ACE Exam (9A0-129) available (along with the older, Flex 3 version).
However, when going to Pearson VUE website (the exam provider), I found that starting today (13 Oct 2011), the no longer support the Flex 4 exam, offering as alternative the Flex 4.5 certification exam (9A0-182):
Pearson VUE: Adobe:

Adobe does not mention anything about that, they don’t provide any study guidelines, nor specific details about the exam (sections, number of questions, time allowed, etc). This lack of communication between the two entities (let’s go with that) is quite strange in my opinion.
I contacted both Adobe and Pearson VUE – and I’ll update this post as soon as I will have more details.

Update 25 Oct 2011: Pearson VUE answered me suggesting to contact Adobe for more information.