Hi all,
I'm new to coderanch despite I read many topics in the past, especially when I started my studies for the OCP 1Z0-819 exam certification.
Overall it took exactly 3 months for me to prepare my studies.
I started with the awesome OCP guide written by Jeanne Boyasky and Scott Selikoff, both the guide book and the exercises book have proven very helpful. It tooks 2 months of full immersion studies to complete both. At least for a senior
java programmer, I believe that a junior programmer could take 3 or 4 month minimum.
I had hard times trying to memorize some parts of java like all the functional interfaces, the whole table of operators precedence, all the deque methods. So I decided to code a small project to help myself to memorize these concepts, I'll share it here in case anyone wants to contribute or suggest improvements:
https://github.com/thermz/OCPTrainer
After the 3 exam simulations of the OCP exercises book, my results weren't that good (74, 70, 72). I probably would have passed the real exam, but I wasn't completely confident so I also decided to pay my 10 bucks for Entuware mocks.
I cleared the 3 foundation exams with an excellent performance (76, 84, 89), but then at my first Enthuware mock I failed pretty hard with a terrible 58 (I got overtime and I had not enough time to review the long questions marked).
Then it got better from time to time, and after 12 mocks I decided to move to the real exam.
The level of the questions was actually similar to the Enthuware mocks but there were a couple of very easy questions, for instance "which is the module included in every java application?" was a trivial question indeed

.
Many questions require reasoning and a clear mind so the suggestion of having a good rest before the exam is absolutely true.
I passed the exam with 85% score, overall I think it's a good score. Both the guide and Enthuware mocks helped me a lot.
I'm available for any clarification about my certification experience and my desktop app.