OCPJP (1Z0-804)

[J Deckarm]

Passed today with 91%
Preparation material: K+B OCP7 book, Ganesh-Sharma OCP7 book (tests only), enthuware OCP7 tests, K+B SCJP6 practice tests book
Preparation lasted over several months, I started already back in 2014 summer but then significant periods of time were completely skipped due to heavier workload or other priorities. I had a company voucher that expires at the end of October so it had to be completed by now. Eventually I spent the last 14 weeks with processing one topic per week in detail based on my earlier prepared notes/coding (hereby sending my greetings to Roel de Nijs for reviewing all my errata posts), and then the last two weeks with one topic per day final checking

The exam was not particularly hard, e.g. generic and threads were a piece of cake compared to some of the more complex practice questions, but there were surprisingly high number of questions that contained topics that were explicitly noted as not being part of the exam (e.g. io streams, matcher replacing, rowset property setters) or contained API that I did not remember ever to be appearing neither in the K+B book nor in the ~1200 practice questions I went through

[Sergej Smoljanov]

Congratulations. and Thanks for topic that not mentioned in exam topic

[Roel De Nijs]

Hi J Deckarm,

Congratulations champion! Great achievement Now it's time to relax a bit and have a (well-deserved) (or 2 or 3). And if you want to spoil yourself have a Belgian beer, our beers are the best of the world

Don't forget to add your name to the OcpjpWallOfFame!

J Deckarm wrote:(hereby sending my greetings to Roel de Nijs for reviewing all my errata posts)

You are welcome!

J Deckarm wrote:The exam was not particularly hard, e.g. generic and threads were a piece of cake compared to some of the more complex practice questions, but there were surprisingly high number of questions that contained topics that were explicitly noted as not being part of the exam (e.g. io streams, matcher replacing, rowset property setters) or contained API that I did not remember ever to be appearing neither in the K+B book nor in the ~1200 practice questions I went through

The exam objectives of Oracle certification exams are pretty broadly defined (certainly compared with the old Sun days). So that makes it very easy to add/remove questions about certain topics. This makes it harder for authors of a study guide to know which topics they have to cover. And most study guides will cover a little more than what they think is needed, so they can anticipate a little to possible changes in the exam topics. But once a study guide is published, there's very little which can be done.
And you have to make choices and make a selection of the classes/interfaces of a given exam objective you'll be covering in the study guide. Because if you would cover every class/interface related with the exam oibjectives, you'll probably have a study guide of 2-3000 pages and that's impossible to study.

Kind regards,
Roel