Hello Guys,
Finally I cleared my OCA SE8 exam with 84%.
I had nearly 6 months experience with
java. Being a graduate in Electronics & Communication, initially coding was a herculian task for me.
Later when the company I was working for had more tasks assigned with java coding, I thought I should somehow elevate myself to stand upto the mark.
OCA was really a kick start for this.
These are the materials I referred.
1) OCA Java SE 8 Programmer I Study Guide (Exam 1Z0-808) by Edward Finegan, Robert Ligouri.
2) Enthuware Mock Tests.
Preparation Duration: Four Months, along with a regular job. Mostly studied during weekends.
I would not say (1) is the best book for the preparation, it would give a peripheral idea on the topics to be covered. My first round of reading was in a hurry and I wanted to attend the Enthuware somehow. Needless to say, I flunked the first mock exam with just 15%.
Then I realized, I need to dig deep in each topic. And I went through each topic again, scribbling out the important points then and there in notepads which helped me to a great extent during last time revisions. I always approached my colleagues in some concepts which was vague. If not solved, I referred stack overflow or, coderanch for better understanding.
For eg : I loved the way pass by value/reference is explained with a real time scenario in code ranch -->
http://www.javaranch.com/campfire/StoryPassBy.jsp
As said in many reviews, I discouraged myself from using Eclipse
IDE for learning the basic concepts. This would help a lot to distinguish between compile time and real time errors.
Later when the basics were more clear, I moved to IDE and practised a good amount whenever I got time.
I have commited some of them in my git repository :
https://github.com/Shabnam17/javase8-learnings
Traversing through each standard
test in enthuware was a great feel. I almost got addicted to doing tests, understanding the mistakes, and seeing the improvement I had from the initial score of 15% was motivating.
In the succeeding tests I got 77%,80%,92%,89% and so on.
I also did retake many tests. Even though I was familiar with most of them, rereading the explainations gave me more insight into the concepts.
In between I practised Mala Gupta's SE7 mock exam. The pdf is available. This gave me an out of the box approach since I was almost aligned to the enthuware questioning
patterns by then.
I took my last day test 3 days before exam giving myself some time to correct the mistakes since it was said all the questions were unique in that.
And I secure 83%.
And 84% for thr the real exam!! :O
The day just before exam, I closed all my books and stayed calm. The voyage was really great (Tedious of couse, but worth it in the end). Looking forward for OCP.
I think this would help any OCAJP8 aspirants out there.
Thanks and Regards,
Shabnam Sidhik