Passed 1Z0-813 OCJP8 with 76%

[Rajeev Rnair]

Hi guys,
I have passed 1Z0-813 - OCPJP8 upgrade exam yesterday with 76%. Studied around a month for this. (not full time though)
This is my lowest score in Java exams so far, but at least I am glad that I passed.

Used the following books:
1. OCPJP8 Exam 1Z0-809 A Comprehensive OCPJP 8 Certification Guide by S G Ganesh, Tushar Sharma, Hari Kiran Kumar G
2. OCPJP Java8 - Part 2 by Jeanne Boyarsky and Scott Selikoff
3. Enthuware mock exams
For mock exams, I used enthuware. This really helped a lot. I scored in the range of 60 to 65% in Enthuware mocks, but spent a lot more time in reading their explanations / answers.
As usual, their notes are really good.

There were couple of questions on CyclicBarrier, which I didn't see in 813 exam topics
Lots of tricky questions. So read questions again and again. You may see "null" and you think it is null
Almost every questions were mixed with lambdas and streams (at least 90%)
Several questions on reduce(), compute(), remoevIf(), computeIfPresent(), flatMap(), mapToDouble, collect(), Collectors.groupingBy(), Collectors.counting(), average(), replaceAll(), Comparator, thenComparing(), reversed() etc.
Make sure you know all these method signatures. Some of them has Function as an argument, some has BiFunction, UnaryOperator, Predicate, Consumer etc.
Also check the return values. Which one returns int, long, Optional<T>, boolean, void etc. Files.walk(), walkFileTree(), find(), Path.relativize(), FileVisitor interface, WatchService APIs, ForkJoin API's etc.
Got several questions on Exceptions, try() with resources, AutoCloseable too.

Good luck to you all!

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Congrats Rajeev! It's a really tough exam. Don't worry about the score!

[Scott Selikoff]

Congrats Rajeev! Glad our book could help! I concur with Jeanne, the OCP exams (all 3 of them) are among the hardest in years, especially since they include so many stream questions. Don't fret the score, you did it!

Yeah, CyclicBarrier isn't in the objective list for that upgrade exam, they must have borrowed some questions from the full exam. It's one of the reasons we recommend people read our entire book, even if they are just taking the upgrade exam.

[Rajeev Rnair]

Thanks Jeanne and Scott.
Your OCPJP book was really good and helpful! Glad that you have added a special section for 1Z0-813 upgrade exam

[Scott Selikoff]

Rajeev Rnair wrote:Your OCPJP book was really good and helpful! Glad that you have added a special section for 1Z0-813 upgrade exam

Glad to hear! We actually rushed to write that part while the book was getting ready for print, since it included so many extra objectives! If you really liked our book, please share your experiences in an Amazon review, to help others thinking of taking the upgrade exam. Congrats again!

[Scott Selikoff]

Looks like Oracle just (within the last week) changed the Concurrency objective to now include CyclicBarrier.

Original version:

Use collections from the java.util.concurrent package with a focus on the advantages over and differences from the traditional java.util collections

New version:

Use classes from the java.util.concurrent package including CyclicBarrier and CopyOnWriteArrayList with a focus on the advantages over and differences from the traditional java.util collections

We've also added this to our OCP 8 book page. It's why we recommend you always check the objectives before taking the exam. Oracle is notorious for tweaking them at any time!

[Paul Anilprem]

Scott Selikoff wrote:Looks like Oracle just (within the last week) changed the Concurrency objective to now include CyclicBarrier.

Original version:

Use collections from the java.util.concurrent package with a focus on the advantages over and differences from the traditional java.util collections

New version:

Use classes from the java.util.concurrent package including CyclicBarrier and CopyOnWriteArrayList with a focus on the advantages over and differences from the traditional java.util collections

We've also added this to our OCP 8 book page. It's why we recommend you always check the objectives before taking the exam. Oracle is notorious for tweaking them at any time!

They changed the objective now but had questions on these two topics in the exam for quite a while

[S G Ganesh]

Congrats Rajiv. I missed out your post and just saw it now. Glad to know that you read our book - hope you found it useful! If you liked it, please write a review of the book in Amazon.com page for the book.

[zent Zent]

Hello Rajeev Rnair,

Would it be possible to contact you through email? I have some questions about preparing for Java certifications.

Thank you