View Newsletter

It's '007
 

Newsletter



We wish everybody a great year!
We sure think it will be one...


Skills Matter Partnership


London-based Skills Matter has partnered up with us. The partnership will deliver a unique blended-learning solution to UK software architects and developers across the UK.

Here's the low down ...

UK users should see the auction from Skills Matter: 2 tickets to the Ruby on Rails (RoR) eXchange (worth £75 each) on February 9th in London.
Learn and discuss about well factored Rails, high performance Rails, the Hobo project, rerouting Rails, and testing and Rails.
More info HERE...



QCon

A new enterprise software development conference is starting in London,  March 12-16th, 2007.
The conference will feature 2 days of tutorials and three full conferences days with over 70 sessions presented by over 40 speakers including Martin Fowler, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Dave Thomas (Pragmatic Programmers), Spring creator Rod Johnson, LINQ creator Erik Meijer, and more. QCon aims to become a major annual event providing a venue for learning, networking, and tracking innovation in the Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA, and Agile communities, with tracks on architecture & design, Ajax, Investment Bank architectures, and Usability.

Discounts are available, eg, UK users on JavaBlackBelt, get a 5% reduction when they register by Feb 15th.
Visit qcon at: http://qcon.infoq.com

We will be at QCon! The QCon team has invited to offer the JavaBlackBelt Challenge. It was a smashing success at JavaPolis in December -- AND we weren't handing out free beer!


One MILLION answers

Our website reached a truly significant milestone: a tally of one million answers (to the multiple choice questions) in the database. We're very proud of this because it shows you are a really (really) active community, sharing your precious time for the JavaBlackBelt exams. In particular, this tally means one million times (that's A LOT of activity) you read through, understood and then answered a question.
And for that, we'd like to thank you for your continued efforts, interest and dedication.

NEW EXAMS


RELEASED: SQL & RDB - Basic exam
Two brown belts: Sergey Trasko of Latvia and Jeanne Boyarsky of the USA, built this exam to test basic SQL and database concepts presumed to be known for passing the JDBC exam. They included in the objectives page two very useful learning resources. Have a look ...



RELEASED: Regular Expressions exam
Green Belt, Graeme Dunlop, a Java Dev in Melbourne, Australia, built this exam to test your knowledge of writing and interpreting regular expressions without expecting you to be a human Matcher.
Graeme also included some very good reference resources of Java's RegEx implementation. Check it out...

Newly created: Java NIO Brown Belt Sergey Trasko, created the Java NIO exam. The new exam was given the green light by Java architect, consultant and author of Java NIO (O'Reilly), Ron Hitchens. The exam will go into Beta very soon. View the Java NIO objectives.





NEW FEATURES

Got points to spare?
Give some of them away!

It's E-Z to do:

  1. Go into your profile
  2. Click "Manage..."
  3. Click "list contributions"
  4. There, below your profile description, you'll see the panel to give points.

WHY give points (aside from being a nice person)?
  • Help a fellow JavaBlackBelt user's eligibility for an exam/new belt
  • Team up with someone for an auction

* * * 

Update for "Who's choosing whose"
It's nice (for mods and admins) to have an E-Z way to see who voted for who. As we promised, now EVERY user can see who's voting for whose questions.

* * * 






Thanks for taking the time to read this! We appreciate your interest and continue support that keeps the JavaBlackBelt community going - strong!