OCA SE7 OR OCA SE8, Which one should be Preferred?

[tarun mudgal]

As of now there are two certifications available OCA SE7 and OCA SE8, which one should I opt? Considering the fact that I've just started learning Java from past few months, I can pick any version. Please suggest me with your experience.

As I googled for the preparation material, I found several e-books for OCA SE7 but didn't find any e-book for OCA SE8. In case, if OCA SE8 should be preferred over OCA SE7, please let me know the topics added in OCA SE8 over OCA SE7 and from where I can get reference material for these newly added topics?

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

tarun mudgal wrote:As I googled for the preparation material, I found several e-books for OCA SE7 but didn't find any e-book for OCA SE8.

I wrote a book for OCA which is available in e-book form. There aren't a lot of differences between OCA 7 and OCA 8. I mapped the objectives here.The main new topics are Java 8 dates and lambdas/predicates.

tarun mudgal wrote:As of now there are two certifications available OCA SE7 and OCA SE8, which one should I opt? Considering the fact that I've just started learning Java from past few months, I can pick any version. Please suggest me with your experience.

The main difference is that which exam you take for the OCA determines which one you take for the OCP. There's lots of differences there. For people who want to take the OCP quickly, they should definitely take 7. You'd be ok with either. I'd recommend 8 because the OCP will focus more on lambdas and less on details of concurrency/threading/jdbc/etc that people don't use in real life. (They kept the most important parts on each topic.)

[Sergej Smoljanov]

oca se 8, you just begin so go last version. I think this is best path for now