S G Ganesh & Tushar Sharma: Which part of the exam requires the most study?

[Joshua Smith]

S G Ganesh & Tushar Sharma-

I have the SCJP for Java 1.5 certification. Which section of the exam do you think requires the most amount of study for those that already hold the SJCP certification?

Thank you,
Joshua Smith

[T. Sharma]

Hi Joshua,

Since you have SCJP 5 certification, you can take upgrade exam to Java SE 7. The short answer of your question is: "it depends". It depends on what you already know. For instance, in case you are very familiar with design patterns but not really familiar with new features introduced in Java 7, then you need to emphasize on "Language enhancements" (features introduced in Java 7) rather than patterns. In general, OCPJP aspirants find questions on concurrency tough.

[S G Ganesh]

Hi Joshua,

Thank you for asking this question - in fact, we find that this question and the difference between SCJP and OCPJP are the most common questions on OCPJP exam preparation.

In my opinion, concurrency is the topic that is toughest and takes most of the time when taking Upgrade to Java SE 7 Programmer (IZ0-805) exam.

As you may already know, IZ0-805 covers these high-level topics 1) language enhancements (such as diamond operator, try-with-resources, and switch based on strings) 2) design patterns (Singleton, Factory, DAO, ...) 3) JDBC (such as RowSet interfaces) 4) Concurrency (mainly java.util.concurrent utlities, threadpools, fork-join, ...) 5) Localization (resource bundles, formatting for locales, ...) 6) NIO.2 (APIs such as Path, Files, WatchService, ...).

Most of these topics are knowledge-based, for example, if we write JDBC programs, it is easy to understand the semantics and answer questions in the exam. With preparation, we can handle JDBC questions with ease. Similarly, there isn't too much difficulty to understand new features in Java 7.

However, Concurrency is a tough topic and its a slippery slope, and perhaps would require most time for preparation. Still, in the exam, we believe it would be difficult to answer all the questions on this topic correctly. The API appears to be deceptively small, but there are quite a few classes and interfaces in this package. However, the main difficulty is in understanding and using them correctly. It would take considerable time to learn to use Semaphores, CyclicBarriers, Phasers, etc correctly (and I admit I have made quite a few mistakes while learning them, and there are a few mistakes in the book as well).

Another topics that require considerable preparation is design patterns.

At sub-topic level, we would recommend writing programs to get a good grip on WatchService, RowSet interfaces, etc) - it is difficult to assimilate these APIs just by reading them.

[Nick Widelec]

Ganesh Sg wrote:Hi Joshua,


However, Concurrency is a tough topic and its a slippery slope, and perhaps would require most time for preparation. Still, in the exam, we believe it would be difficult to answer all the questions on this topic correctly. The API appears to be deceptively small, but there are quite a few classes and interfaces in this package. However, the main difficulty is in understanding and using them correctly. It would take considerable time to learn to use Semaphores, CyclicBarriers, Phasers, etc correctly (and I admit I have made quite a few mistakes while learning them, and there are a few mistakes in the book as well).

Hi Ganesh,
Have you or anybody who gave the exam seen questions on the exam related to Semaphores, CyclicBarriers, Phasers?
It's the first time I hear there are such topics in the exam. Once I asked the quesiton on www.enthuware.com/forum and they said it's not on the exam topics..

However if you confirm having had such questions it would change quite a bit.

Thanks in advance.

[S G Ganesh]

Hi Nick Widelec,

I share my experience and it's up to you. When I took the exam 8-10 months back, I got one question each on Fork/Join, TimeUnit, Executor, ThreadPool, and one synchronizer (don't remember which one). Some were difficult ones as well. Since it is many months now, my memory is rusty, but I for sure remember one code snippet on changing the order of calling fork and join. If you change the order of fork and join, what will happen a) the performance will degrade and will be same as sequential code b) the result will be wrong c) ... And, yes, I remember one scenario question which went like this. There are four friends who get together to complete cooking items for dinner, and each starts preparing one item. Which of the concurrency utility would you use for this scenario where items are prepared in parallell and then finally all four friends sit together and start having their dinner (sorry for my poor wording of the problem - as I said, my memory is faint with time now) .

However, each exam instance is different. You may be interested in reading this earlier blog post: http://ocpjp7.blogspot.in/2013_04_01_archive.html
A quote from this link: "You may not even get any questions on a topic. For example, many takers of exam have reported that they did not get any questions in topics such as Concurrency or JDBC."