cert-prep

A terminal UI application for practicing certification exam questions. Load a question bank from a JSON file, answer multi-select questions with immediate color-coded feedback, and see your final score.

Usage

cert-prep <config.json> [-n N] [-w CATEGORY:WEIGHT ...]

On the first run, you must provide a path to a question bank JSON file:

cert-prep ./my-questions.json

The config is then registered locally. On subsequent runs, you can omit the path and pick from previously used configs via an interactive selector:

cert-prep

The selector lists all previously used question banks sorted by most recently used.

Options

Flag	Description
<config.json>	Path to a question bank JSON file (required on first use)
-n N, --sample-amount N	Override the number of questions to sample
-w CATEGORY:WEIGHT, --weight CATEGORY:WEIGHT	Set category weight for stratified sampling (repeatable)

Examples

# First run: load a question bank
cert-prep ./aws-sa-questions.json

# Subsequent runs: select from previously used configs
cert-prep

# Sample only 10 questions
cert-prep ./aws-sa-questions.json -n 10

# Emphasize a category
cert-prep ./aws-sa-questions.json -w "AWS Storage:3" -w "AWS Security:2"

Controls

Key	Action
Space	Toggle answer selection
Enter	Submit answer / Next question
Arrow keys / j / k	Navigate answer choices
q / Esc	Quit

Mouse clicks on checkboxes and buttons are also supported (not in all terminals).

After submitting an answer, selections are color-coded:

• Green [+] -- correct selection
• Yellow [O] -- missed correct answer
• Red [X] -- incorrect selection

Question bank format

Question banks are JSON files with the following structure:

{
  "title": "My Certification Exam",
  "sample_amount": 10,
  "category_weights": {
    "Category A": 2,
    "Category B": 1
  },
  "questions": [
    {
      "text": "Which option is correct?",
      "answer_choices": ["Option A", "Option B", "Option C"],
      "correct_answer": [1],
      "category": "Category A"
    }
  ]
}

Field	Description
title	Display name for the question bank
sample_amount	Number of questions to randomly sample per session
category_weights	Relative weights for stratified sampling across categories
questions[].text	The question prompt
questions[].answer_choices	List of answer options
questions[].correct_answer	Zero-indexed list of correct answer indices
questions[].category	Category label for the question

Building from source

Requires GHC and Cabal. Uses hpack (package.yaml).

cabal build
cabal run cert-prep -- ./config.json