Passed OCAJP(1Z0-803) with 86% and now preparing for 1Z0-804

[R K Sharma]

Hi,
Recently, I have successfully completed my first Java Certification with 86%. Now, I'm planning for 1Z0-804. Anyone,help me to understand the difficulty level of this exam compare to first exam (1z0-803). Currently, I'm reading K&B's OCAOCP Java SE7 Programmer Study Guide. Is it enough ? Since, I have 2+ years of Java exp, which helps me to pass first exam without any preparation.

[S G Ganesh]

Congrats for passing the OCA exam. In my experience, I found OCPJP 7 to be much more difficult than OCAJP 7. So, more preparation would really help for getting OCPJP 7 certification. In addition to the excellent book you already have, you can practice by writing more code.

[Simon Roberts]

Congratulations! Good score too, well done!

Indeed, the second exam is substantially harder, they seem to like to test quite a bit of API stuff in there that you'd normally have IDE help with, be sure to spend some time writing a lot of code to investigate the behaviors of API methods on a variety of topics that you don't have extensive "in the field" experience with.

Good luck for part 2!

[S G Ganesh]

a variety of topics that you don't have extensive "in the field" experience with

I completely agree. In fact, at least for lambdas if we have worked in functional languages or in languages like Groovy, we would have prior experience using them in real projects. But Streams API is completely new and there are lots of complex stuff underneath (how streams work, how parallelism is supported using Fork/Join internally, etc). So, it requires considerable reading and playing with sample programs to get a good hang of it. Fortunately, there are lots of very good books on Java 8 - so we have help

[Roel De Nijs]

R K Sharma wrote:Recently, I have successfully completed my first Java Certification with 86%.

Congratulations champion! Don't forget to add your name to the OcajpWallOfFame.

R K Sharma wrote:Now, I'm planning for 1Z0-804. Anyone,help me to understand the difficulty level of this exam compare to first exam (1z0-803).

It will be much harder than the OCA exam for 2 reasons:
1/ you'll have to know much more advanced topics, like generics, collections, file nio, threading, concurrency, jdbc,...
2/ you'll need a more detailed knowledge of the contents to be able to answer the questions correctly.

R K Sharma wrote:Currently, I'm reading K&B's OCAOCP Java SE7 Programmer Study Guide. Is it enough ?

Excellent choice! I passed 3 SCJP exams using K&B, these forums and lots of coding practice as only resources. So it's definitely enough to pass the exam.

Hope it helps!
Kind regards,
Roel

[Roel De Nijs]

S G Ganesh wrote:In fact, at least for lambdas if we have worked in functional languages or in languages like Groovy, we would have prior experience using them in real projects. But Streams API is completely new and there are lots of complex stuff underneath (how streams work, how parallelism is supported using Fork/Join internally, etc).

1Z0-804 is the OCPJP7 exam, so you don't have to worry about lambdas, streams, fork/join, data/time API and so on.

[Sergej Smoljanov]

Congratulations