OCP Oracle Certified Professional Java SE 11 Developer Practice Tests: I can't come out and play now

[Charles O'Leary]

What (hide, sleep, walking, mnemonics, turn off phone notifications, etc) aides do you regularly use to absorb and/or stay focused when studying exam material?

[Jesse Silverman]

I can say that one of the reasons that I bought Jeanne and Scott's books dead-tree style is because there are so many distractions when reading on an online device.

Can some people focus and self-discipline enough to ignore the million notifications constantly coming in not directly relating to what they are trying to learn?  Yes.

Do many people find it easier to say "I am just reading these 15 pages right here I just flipped thru with my fingers, and until I am done reading them nothing but reading, reflecting and taking notes and looking at the notes (which I would also do on paper)?"  Yes.

I often go down rabbit holes when I am reading/watching materials online.  Most of the time, the stuff I am looking at is either good review or something I will need later.

But it often is NOT directly relevant to getting the details in hand properly understood/memorized.

One of the things you referred to in one of your other posts is the absolutely insane time pressures on the 819.

If you know everything, but have to think about it for a good long while, you can be toast even with best test-taking practices due to lag.

I really feel you need to know things as well as the name of the street you live on, your dog's name, favorite actress.

I have had almost no trouble comprehending any of the material, I understand almost everything.

But being able to go thru the test means being able to pretty much instantly recall a very wide body of information, often no longer neatly compartmentalized the way the chapters are originally presented.  One problem has you recalling and integrating things from Chapters 5 and 11 of 816, but if you noticed the one trick from the 3rd chapter of the 815 book you can answer instantly without even thinking about those....

Caveat -- I haven't taken the 819 yet, however, comparing my performance and times on mock stuff with those who have has resulted in me wanting to know everything backwards-and-forwards, "cold".

I already thought of myself as a good/fast test taker from SAT's, GRE, standardized tests and 5 years of engineering school...I feel like the 819 intentionally is hard and demands you know everything in a way that you can quickly spot details, recall near-instantly, etc.

There is a spinoff to Jeopardy called "The Chase" where the contestants are competing against 3 top Jeopardy champions...the harder parts feel like that, in that the people who win almost always answer the questions before they even finish asking them.

We see some people here that have breezed thru and aced it, some of them may just be fantastic at Java due to deep experience, but knowing the material "very well" and maintaining a focus that leads to high velocity thru the test (including recognizing questions you should just take a wild-ass guess at and move on because you can probably do 3 or 4 others in the time it will take to complete them) also seems to be something they "just do".

p.s. My dog is my study partner.  After I have gone thru enough material, I go for a long walk with him and tell him all about it while we walk around the neighborhood sniffing things and peeing on them.  Well, we divide the work up asymetrically....

Good Luck!

[Jorge Ruiz-Aquino]

Jesse Silverman wrote:I can say that one of the reasons that I bought Jeanne and Scott's books dead-tree style is because there are so many distractions when reading on an online device.

Can some people focus and self-discipline enough to ignore the million notifications constantly coming in not directly relating to what they are trying to learn?  Yes.

Totally agree. I got distracted very easily with unrelated things while watching/reading online material. But it is totally different when I read a book, even technical/programming books.
I know of some people that don't want to buy printed books because of the fear of "what people will say!"

I would say, drink water, fresh air and good sleep times helps better on learning stuff. Although not everyone can do it regularly.

[Jesse Silverman]

I agree with everything my previously-unknown-to-me twin Jorge said.

I have also had a hard time with getting hung up on what looks like small details to:
1. Everyone normal
2. Ranch staff
3. Sometimes the book authors

The hard thing is that there are countless questions I've gotten wrong or took way too much time on due to details that seemed much smaller to me than the ones I was obsessed with.

One thing you are paying the authors (Jeanne, Scott, Enthuware) for, perhaps the main thing, is knowing which of countless details are actually important to the test.

It often involves questions containing errors you would never make, or using some language feature you could program a million lines without necessarily using, but is important to the test.

The people here at the Ranch are great at telling you that you are barking up the wrong dog / don't need to worry about THAT without being too mean about it.

Another reason I love 'em!

You asked about "What is going to be mind-blowing for a competent Java 6 guy?" (paraphrase)

All of the stuff about functional programming is fantastic and not necessarily inherently difficult,
but a major mindset-shift, you are thinking about stuff very differently than in classical Java.
There is a lot of material to know and to know well about SAM interfaces, out-of-the-box functional interfaces, method references, streams and collectors.
These are concepts brought in from other languages and Java-ized "recently"...

I think the focus on multi-threading strategies and language/standard library features changed a LOT since the classical days as well.

NIO.2 has some very much easier, cleaner, more powerful ways of dealing with things you already learned how to do in clunkier, more awkward, less elegant ways.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Jesse Silverman wrote:. . . what looks like small details . . .

We see so many people who stumble over “small details”. Search my posts for the last 48 hours and you will see people getting confused about the difference between precedences and execution order, or the definition of “default constructor”.

[Jesse Silverman]

Campbell Ritchie wrote:

Jesse Silverman wrote:. . . what looks like small details . . .

We see so many people who stumble over “small details”. Search my posts for the last 48 hours and you will see people getting confused about the difference between precedences and execution order, or the definition of “default constructor”.

My heart goes out to you...

the certification exams are certainly more standardized than what people read/watch/know before they start to try to take them, that's part of it!

I am a big stickler for very precise wording when preparing people for notoriously tricky exams, of course.

Also, there's some otherwise very good Python stuff that uniformly says "parent class" and "child class" everywhere, that was one of the first things I corrected when I came here, specifying "super class", "sub class", "direct superclass" and "direct subclass" where appropriate.

Of course, Python allows multiple direct inheritance, so at least we don't have all the single-parent class families that Conservatives were traditionally dismayed by.

Doing inheritance in Python today, if that wasn't clear from context.

Trying not to lose my Java hard-earned Java gains made over the past few months, so monitoring these forums too.
[When I hit new stuff in Python that behaves differently to Java (which had become "normal" in my brain in late 2020) going back and comparing the differing behaviors in Python and Java]