Hi everyone,
Just passed my OCA exam today. I prepared for a month. I had taken an intro to
Java class many years ago, so I first thought I could get by just reading the Java guide at Oracle.com, but when I took the Enthuware practice exams, my scores on the first three were 35%, 50%, and 51%. So I got Mala Gupta's OCA Java SE 7 Programmer I and read it cover to cover. After scoring a 77% on Gupta's mock exam, I retook the first three Enthuware exams, then took the last three Enthuware exams, and got 71%, 73%, 76%.
The
test was far easier than Enthuware's tricky questions, and a lot of the hard stuff on Enthuware -- wrappers, inner classes, hashcode, -- I didn't encounter on the exam. But the easy / moderate Enthuware questions were almost spot on as the real questions, so I felt that prepared me really well, to know what the common tricks are that the test throws at you.
Overall, the Gupta book was very comprehensive, and covered exactly what the test's content was on. Her overview of what all the Exceptions were, and what methods Strings/SB and Arrays/AL had made the test a breeze. I was able to skim her end of chapter summary lists the morning before the exam as a refresher. A very worthy buy!