Well, it's official: I took the position as role as principal author of the Brainbench AJAX Exam. Now I need to turn my usual AJAX curriculum into something worthy of an exam. Basically I need to create a suitable outline with about 7-9 topics and 3-5 subtopics and put 4-6 questions into each subtopic to come up with a grand total of 160 questions. Since I've done this already with the C# 2.0 exam, it should be fairly straight forward! Err, maybe...
What will the exam cover? Well, the fundamentals of AJAX. I'm working on a video series right now that will cover what I refer to as the three pillars of AJAX: Modern JavaScript, Browser Dynamics (a.k.a. "DOM Manipulation" or "DHTML"), and AJAX communication. Modern JavaScript topics that will be covered are JavaScript namespaces, closures, multi-cast events. The browser dynamics include topics such as DOM tree navigation, node creation and removal, interpreting node manipulation (e.g. moving a box, changing a color) as well as architecture decisions (e.g. "should this be a div or a span?"). Finally, AJAX communication topics will include XMLHttpRequest usage, result interpretation, performance concerns, JSON translation, and callback creation. These are of course not all the topics, but just a sampling. The point is that the exam will basically be the exam for the video series.
To be clear, I will not have anything vendor specific near the exam. This is one of the reasons I took the position. The last thing we need is an exam which tests you on two or three completely different frameworks. Java developers won't have a clue about ASP.NET AJAX and ASP.NET developers won't have a clue about the other 100 or so frameworks in existence. I also have absolutely no intention of asking about obscure AJAX techniques that almost no one would ever know (e.g. request queuing, animation). So, really, my video series will cover more than the exam as I have every intention of relying fairly heavily on Firebug in the video series and , but that can't be on the exam.
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