Question to Scott and Jeanne with regards to OCA/OCP Practice Test

[Oliver Tiam]

Hi Scott and Jeanne. First of all, i would like to thank you for the success of your OCA Oracle Certified Associate Java SE 8 Programmer 1 Study Guide book, it really helped me thru during my course of review before taking the OCA exam last January. Now, i am starting to make preparations for the OCP Oracle Certified Professional exam. As i skimmed on the topics relating to the OCP exam, can you give me advised on which topic should i concentrate more and give more emphasis. Or should i say which topic seems to have a steep learning curve? Aside of course giving considerations to all the previous topics in the OCA exam. Thanks a lot and keep on producing quality books.

[Roel De Nijs]

Oliver Tiam wrote:As i skimmed on the topics relating to the OCP exam, can you give me advised on which topic should i concentrate more and give more emphasis. Or should i say which topic seems to have a steep learning curve?

From my own experience: threading and concurrency are very challenging topics and that's reflected in the exam questions. And advanced generics can become quite complex and hard.

[Oliver Tiam]

Thanks Roel for sharing your thoughts on it.

[Scott Selikoff]

Streams.  Given that streams and functional programming appear in a majority of the chapters, you need to be solid with them before moving on to some of the later chapters like threading/IO.  I recommend not just reading about streams but writing your own code that uses streams in order to get more practice.  The learning curve can be steep but they are a lot of fun once you get used to it.

I agree with Roel that Concurrency can be difficult, but on the plus side the OCP 8 removes almost references to the Thread class, instead focusing solely on the Concurrency API.  I find using Concurrency API to be worlds easier than having to manage threads directly, but there is still a bit of education involved for either.

[Oliver Tiam]

Hi Scott. Thanks a lot for the advise. I will make sure to focus on studying Streams not just by reading, but coding it and be confident about what i will learn before taking the OCP exam.  Thanks again.