Studying towards Certified SOA Consultant of SOASchool.com

I’ve been interested in SOA and web services for years and to make things "official" I’ve decided to get certified in this area. After looking around for the possibilities I decided to take the certification of SOASchool.com. Why did I choose this "vendor", it’s based on the excellent books of Thoma Erl and it’s technology agnostic. The fact that it’s technology agnostic is very important to me, SOA is a lot more than generating some web services from a development tool.

So the plan is to become a SOA Certified Consultant by the summer of next year, we’ll see in a few months if this is too ambitious. I received the self-study kit and text books this week, delivery took about 10 days (from Canada to Belgium). Every exam kit includes a printed version of the course presentation and some sample questions, self-study guide that links to the book chapters you need review for the exam, audio tutor cd’s, flash cards and a Prometric exam voucher. For the complete contents of each study kit go here. As mentioned in the first paragraph, the exams are based on the books of Thomas Erl so you’ll also need those. The first exam (S90.01A) uses the book SOA Principles of Service Design, for the full Certified Consultant track you’ll need these 4 books:

• SOA Principles of Service Design
• Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): Concepts, Technology, and Design 
• Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA
• SOA Design Patterns

For the full exam/book correlation go here.

I’ll keep this place updated with my progress and my opinions on the contents and exams as I progress. If you’re interested in other SOA certifications you can have a look at an article of Eric Roch.