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Passed OCAJP - Study Guides/Summary

 
Greenhorn
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Passed 81%

Just wanted to relay my experiences.

STUDY MATERIALS
https://www.amazon.com/Nailing-1Z0-808-Practical-Programmer-Certification/dp/1548193984/
Igor's book, while unorthodox, really focused on tactics needed for the exam. At times it was a tough read, more bulleted points than anything, but what separated it from many of the other books I've seen is that it provided points on a discrete topic then gave you practice questions for that topic. Many other books lump a whole bunch of objectives together and then only provide a dozen or so questions for the whole lot.

https://www.amazon.com/Java-Programmer-Guide-Exams-1Z0-808/dp/1260011399/
I picked this one rather than the B&S study guide because it was newer. It's well written and provided a slew of great examples. I was a little disappointed with the number of end of chapter questions, only about a dozen or so, which seemed light given the amount of material covered.

https://www.amazon.com/OCA-Java-Programmer-Practice-Tests/dp/111936339X
If I had to credit one book on my sucess it would be this book. Tons of exercise questions to practice on. I learned so much from this one book. Things I either didn't "quite get" or was too brainfried to retain. What really made this book shine was the online test bank - much better than previous iterations with installable software. I was able quiz myself, pause, & then go back and review and review the questions and I only found a few errors in the questions/answers. I thought the questions in this book were more inline with what I saw on the exam than any other book. Many, many thanks to Jeannie & Scott for putting this book out.

I know many people use the Enthuware labs. I personally felt from looking at some of the questions that it went above and beyond what I needed for this exam so I didn't end up getting it. I felt like there was enough material to cover/memorize that adding more stuff wasn't beneficial to me - maybe not as bad as learning nuclear medicine before applying a bandaid, but along those lines. I also, contrary to a lot published recommendations, used an IDE exclusively. I am not new to coding and felt that grinding through notepad++ and command line compiling wasn't going to be a great benefit.

I started out reading the various books to get the objectives down. I did this for about 2 months (seems like forever) until 2 weeks before the exam. That's when I really started hitting Jeannie & Scott's practice test book. HARD! It was in those weeks that I nailed a few items that had eluded me. I think it's easy to get information overload while studying, your brain just can't absorb that much at one time and stuff spills over & gets lost. Anyway, in the last weeks I really was able to see where my weak spots were.

EXAM
It started out great, I was breezing through the first 10 questions or so thinking, "Wow, what are all those people talking about? This isn't that hard!" Then next thing I knew, I'd blown a bunch of time on a few questions and suddenly I'm nearly half way into my 2.5 hour test but less than half of the questions finished. That's when I started to feel rushed and it weighed on me the rest of the exam. I finished the last question with just minutes to spare. On my review I found one question that I know was wrong and I'm pretty sure (Face Palm!) changed one answer that was originally right. I'll be honest, as I drove home from the exam, not knowing my results and unable to retrieve them because I'd forgotten my username & password, I wouldn't have been surprised if I'd passed or failed. I was that unsure.

IN CLOSING
While new to Java, I have experience C, C++, C# & Python. However, I was very limited in my OO experience having mainly used C. I'm now moving into working with Java and thought that this exam would get me up to speed. But as I got more and more into it I realized that this cert is more of a complier exam & very little breadth. I'd say that 90% of the exam could have been answered correctly with any IDE. Wait, I'm studying for this super hard exam that doesn't even prove I can code (stated repeatedly in study guides)? I don't need to know multi-threading, serialization, linked lists, recursion, Swing/JavaFx...not even file IO? If the breadth of Java is a mile long, the OCA covers about a yard of it but is a mile deep. That said, I did learn a lot and I'm glad I passed it. I'm not sure it will mean anything job or salary wise other than to add to my growing list of certifications but learning is good right?

 
Creator of Enthuware JWS+ V6
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Congratulations, well done, and thanks for your preparation details and tips.      

Have a Cow!
 
MyExamCloud Software Support
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Congrats Mark Sojourner. Thanks for sharing your experience and study resources.
 
Bartender
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That's great Mark.

When you get a few moments you may want to add yourself to the OCA Hall Of Fame https://coderanch.com/wiki/659980/Ocajp-Wall-Fame.

If your next challenge is the Java 809 OCP exam then you may want to look at the stories found on the OCP Wall Of Fame https://coderanch.com/wiki/659976/Ocpjp-Wall-Fame.
This could save you time, money and frustrations as you can see what resources others used and how they prepared.
 
Enthuware Software Support
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Congratulations!!!
 
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