by Dan Gilpin
I started with the Developer certification as it was reported to be the easiest of the three Associate-level exams. (The icon above says 2018, but I took all three associate-level exams in the second half of 2017).
From here I went on to acloud.guru’s DynamoDB course – Amazon’s NoSQL service.
DynamoDB is a major topic in the AWS Developer – Associate certification. My background has mostly been in Sequel databases like Oracle and MySQL, as well as specialty DB’s like Facebook Parse and iOS Core Data. NoSQL was new to me, so I took the first part of this course to shore that up prior to taking the exam. I hope to go back through this course when time permits. It is quite thorough, and has a heavy emphasis on NoSQL design theory. It also goes deeper into AWS API’s rather than using the GUI console. Good stuff. The second half of the course appears to be spent mostly getting the app (a college registration system) debugged and cleaned up – things that will have to wait until after the exams.
With the Developer and DynamoDB courses I felt pretty good about taking the exam. I then took the practice test from AWS and acloud.guru and went through the AWS Blueprint and the Exam Prep Guide from acloud.guru.
“The initial pass rate for the AWS exams is staggeringly low, due in part to people approaching the AWS exams similarly to other exams in the IT industry.” — Mattias Andersson
This course is led by Mattias Andersson who has passed all five Associate and Professional exams on the first try – with all scores > 90%. He teaches how to learn more efficiently, and how to take AWS exams specifically. Here are the goals of his course:
Ok, at this point I am sick of taking online courses! Time to put it all to the “test” and take the Developer exam. Click here to see the results.