Last year, our CTO Jody blogged about the Drupal Jeopardy game that helped some of us at Zivtech prepare for the Acquia Certified Drupal Site Builder Exam. The credential validates the skills and knowledge of professionals who build Drupal sites using core and contributed modules. I started studying for that exam afterwards, and passed it last December. Here are my study methods and experience, which I think would be especially useful to those who are newer to Drupal.

First, some tips

• The only contributed module you need to know about is Views (a sub module of the Chaos Tool Suite, or CTools, in D7).
• You don't need to know about Drush (the Drupal shell command-line tool) or how to write code for Drupal development.
• You should know the best practices related to server file management and how to install, update, and uninstall modules and themes.
• You should also learn about Drupal best practices concerning security, performance, and community participation using Drupal.org resources.

Basic study steps

1. Read the exam's blueprint to familiarize yourself with it's structure
2. Watch this webinar video recording which explains what is and is not in the exam
3. Manually install a site with only a Drupal 7 core release (see documentation on how)
4. Enable all the core modules and for each read through its help page (provided by the Help module in core)
5. Manually install the Views module
6. Also install and enable the Advanced Help module, which is not part of the exam, but has additional Views documentation aside from its community docs
7. Click through all the links provided by the Admin Menu at the top of the site
8. Build stuff with the site!

Finally, here is the study sheet I created for myself before I took the exam (cleaned up a bit so it's less messy). All of the information on there are gathered from a Drupal 7 site install with Views, from Drupal.org, and from the Internet in general.

I hope this helps you study for the Site Builder Certification exam. When you are ready, you can register for the 75 minute test. Good luck!