I took the AWS Developer Associate certification (DVA-C01) a couple of days back and passed it with a score of 859. On the whole, I prepared for around 2 weeks. I had already passed the AWS Solutions Architect - Associate a couple of years back and hence was aware of most of the services. However, the AWS Developer Associate does expect a lot more knowledge on the serverless side in comparison and hence my main focus was on knowing those services well - Lambda, API Gateway, Dynomo DB, SAM to name a few.
If you are just starting preparation for the exam, the exam guide is a good place to start.
I purchased both Stephane Maarek's course and Adrian Cantrill's course.
I ended up using Stephane Maarek's course because its more concise and I wanted to take the exam as soon as possible. However, if you have the benefit of time, I would recommend Adrian's course too. It's really detailed and goes beyond the certification to help understand the AWS services better.
I purchased Tutorials Dojo's practice tests on Udemy . The questions were quite close to the actual exam questions and the explanations are also quite detailed. I took all 6 tests and reviewed all questions thoroughly.
- https://digitalcloud.training/category/aws-cheat-sheets/aws-developer-associate/
- Cheat sheets on Andrew's video on FreeCodeCamp -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrKRN9zRBWs
The exam itself was quite straightforward. 65 questions in 130 minutes meant that there was ample time to revisit all the questions after attempting them. I thought a few of the questions were tricky where I was conflicted between two of the options and ultimately just went with the one that felt better. Most of the questions though were straightforward. The focus was on serverless with quite a few questions on Lambda, API Gateway, Cloudformation, Dynamo DB.