This month I have been studying to take the Microsoft certification exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with Javascript and CSS3.
The first resource I leveraged was Microsoft Virtual Academy and the freely available online video course presented by Jeremy Foster and Michael Palmero. It did provide a cursory overview of the topics in the exam, though in the context of Windows 8 development first, with web development second. One thing that irritated me about this material was the downloadable PDFs of the slide decks Jeremy and Michael used. You would get lots of slides of agenda points, and lots of slides indicating where a demo would occur, but very few slides with actual explanation or code samples. All in all, these videos were useful, and after I downloaded them on to my iPad, were portable, which helped allow me to study in situations where I did not have a network connection.
One resource that I would not have originally considered was Slideshare.net. Here I found several decks containing sample questions. They were often (always?) from beta versions of the exam, and rarely had any explanations for the correct answers, but they did provide what I thought was a decent representation of the format and types of questions.
Another set of resources I found helpful were other people’s study guides, specifically:
- http://www.bloggedbychris.com/2012/09/19/microsoft-exam-70-480-study-guide/
- http://blog.beckybertram.com/Lists/Exam%2070480%20Study%20Guide/AllItems.aspx
Also helpful was jsfiddle.net, which was great to try out and experiment with many of the methods and techniques in HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. An example of a Fiddle I created is listed below.
CSS3 Flexbox
http://jsfiddle.net/SHn7S/
UPDATE: I passed this exam, and am now starting to study for exam 70-486: Development ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications.
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