Al Razor wrote:Hi Scott and Jeanne,
Could you please answer a couple of questions:
1. From your observations, which topic do you think is the hardest for people who upgrade from Java SE 6 OCP but have experience with Java 8?
2. Do you think that Java OCP certificates still have the same value as they had 5 years ago?
1. Streams and lambdas, since are they largest change to Java since generics. That said, there is a huge advantage in your every day coding if you understand them well. Some of the other topics like Concurrency, Annotations, NIO.2,
JDBC, etc may also be difficult you've never used them so it depends on how broad your knowledge is. One of the values of studying for the cert, tho, is to broaden your knowledge.
2. I think they are more important than ever given how complex Java has grown over the years. Back in the 1.4 Java was relatively simple by comparison so it didn't take a lot of knowledge to know the language well. There are so many new (and exciting) things like Streams, local type inference, annotations, etc, that being a well-rounded Java developer is more important than ever.