I had a chance to try the upcoming (Drupal) Acquia Certified Developer - Front end Specialist Certification Exam. Thanks to Acquia Certification Team for allowing me to try it out.

I have been able to clear it with around 83% score. That was way beyond what I was expecting. I expected the exam to focus heavily on advanced CSS and JS and hence was not expecting a good score. But it turned out the exam gives good weightage to Drupal theming and templating and various other concepts in Drupal that gave me a fair chance to score.

The exam evaluates you on the following areas:

• Fundamental Web Development Concepts

• Theming Concepts

• Sub-Theming Concepts

• Templates

• Template Functions

• Layout Configuration

• Performance

• Security

The official exam blue print and curriculum is not released by Acquia yet. So I do not have the links here for you. They should be out soon. The exam is scheduled to be released for public on December 1st.

But for any of you taking the exam pre-release, or if you are planning to take the exam immediately after the release, here is some information for you that could help you in your preparation before the official study guide comes out.

Fundamental Web Development Concepts

There were questions about CSS, JS, Jquery. Some of the resources that could help:

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en­US/docs/Web

• http://html5doctor.com/

• http://www.webplatform.org/

• http://css­tricks.com/

• http://codepen.io/ ­ Try out your code and see it in action
  
  (From WebChick’s Guide to ACD examination)

CSS Selectors:

• http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_selectors.asp

• http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/the-30-css-selectors-you-must-memorize--net-16048

• http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_selectors.asp

Positioning:

• http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_positioning.asp

Javascript and Jquery: (The below ones are too generic. But I would recommend a full refresher of jquery and javascript if you are a backend developer attempting the certification)

• http://www.w3schools.com/js/

• http://www.w3schools.com/jquery/

Drupal + Javascript:

• Drupal JS API

• Working with JS in Drupal

Drupal + CSS

• Adding Stylesheets

• Adding styles through API

• Overriding Style Sheets

Responsive Web Design:

• http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_mediaquery.asp

Grid Systems:

• A fair idea of any one of those CSS grid systems would help

HTML 5:

• Knowledge of some of the new elements in HTML5

• http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_intro.asp

Theming Concepts

You should make yourself thoroughly familiar with all the Theming and Advanced Theming chapters in The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7.

• Info file of a theme

• Regions . Adding Regions to themes.

• What are the Default Regions and Hidden Regions? Significance of why you would need to have some of them for things to work. (Ex: Devel, Admin Menu Module, Contextual Links).

• When to have a region? When to hardcode?

• Managing your CSS, Adding, Removing CSS,

Sub- Theming Concepts

• Base and Sub Themes

• Creating Subtheme

• Inheritance in themes

• Preparing your base theme

• https://www.drupal.org/node/225125

Layout Configuration

• Layout Strategies

• Managing Blocks

• View Modes

• Views Theming

• Customize Views Output

Templates

• Template Files

• Common Templates

• Overriding Templates

• Global Variables in templates

• Working with Variables in themes

• Naming Conventions

Template Functions:

• Theme Functions , Creating them, Calling them, Overriding them

• Theme Hooks, Suggestions, Suggestions and Template Files, Suggestions and Theme Functions,

• https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules%21system%21theme.api.php/group/themeable/7

• Preprocess Functions, Preprocess Hooks, $VARIABLES

• Using Render, Render Elements, Working with Render Elements, Render Arrays  

• Theming Forms

• Form Alter Hook

Performance:

• Aggregation, Compression

• Front End Performance

Security:

• Handling User Input

• Handling Text

This notes is very specific to the Front End Specialist Certification. If you are looking for Acquia Certified Developer examination, check out my previous post on Cracking Acquia Drupal Certification.

Drop in your comments below if you have any additional resources that would help in the exam preparation that I have missed above.