Scott Selikoff

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since Oct 23, 2005
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I prefer 21 at least for the material, even if it is a harder exam.  I like learning the newest stuff!  It also helps show that employers that you’re certified in a recent version of Java, rather than one that’s a few years old.  On our blog, we cover our experiences taking both exams and 21 was definitely challenging!
We frequently encourage our readers to try things out! While some people learn just by reading, we find practice makes perfect.  We encourage you to read our book and try things out on a computer while reading.
Echoing Jeanne, yes, if you've taken the 17 cert you should focus on new things like records/switch/pattern matching, as the exam contains a fair amount of them.  If there are parts of Java that you dont often use, like streams and lambdas, you should focus on that too.  It really depends on your personal background.  We provide an assessment test at the beginning of our book to try to help guide what you need more practice on.
100%, in fact Jeanne and I were part of a group that reviewed and provided feedback on objectives before the exam was released.  That said, Oracle is free to change topics/questions in the future, but in our experience that change is minimal.
Our book contains a lot of practical knowledge.  In fact, we often give suggestions/tips that aren't part of the exam (usually we say that explicitly) but make for better coding.  There are less practical things that we have to cover, but we often point that out as well.  As an example, when the cert included JDBC (OCP 21 does not ), we would recommend PreparedStatements over Statements, even though the exam only cared about Statements.
I find being certified helps you to become a better software developer.  In part, because it exposes you to aspects of the language you might not be familiar with.  If you're writing Java every day, then I think its definitely worth it.  If you goal is to learn Java more and be confident in what you write (and how your write it), then it's an easy decision.

There is an open debate (not just in Java, across all certifications) about whether it looks good on a resume and/or helps you get a job.  What I always say is, if you have a candidate thats good it can help put you over the top.  But if you have a candidate that's terrible.. it's not going to do much.  Hiring reps tend to look at a candidates entire portfolio, not just a single cert.
Our book, like the real exam, doesn’t always separate questions by single topics.  The exam likes to combine multiple topics on the exam into a single question.  This makes them quite challenging.  For review questions, we tried to keep the topics limited to the material in the chapter itself found it.  For our mock exams (available online) we mix things around a lot more, as these are supposed to simulate the exam.

Preview features are always out of scope for the exam.  We sometimes mention them in the book but we do not cover them in any detail. You have more than enough to learn without adding preview features!
As I mentioned in another post, we did a complete review of everything in our OCP 17 material before putting any of it in our OCP 21 book.  Every word, sentence, and paragraph has checked for accuracy and relevance.  We hope our new book is more streamlined, eliminating material that is no longer critical for the exam, while focusing on the material that is.
If you don't use streams often, then I of course recommend learning them so you can incorporate them into your work when/if you need them.  The new material focusses a lot on switch and pattern matching, which I find makes switch far more useable than its original implementation.  There's a lot of other topics, but it matters what you're doing to know if it would help.  For example, we cover modules but most developers I know don't use modules regularly.
Yes, our book contains everything you need to study for the OCP 21 exam.  That said, we do say in the introduction that this should not be your "first programming book".  Since you're already certified, I'm sure the book is all you need.  The book includes access to online course material with hundreds of additional flash cards and practice questions.
This a bit out of scope for cert exam, and it definitely matters which Cloud provider you go with.  I try to design services that will run across a variety of cloud providers, its one of the reasons K8s is so popular!
Every single word, sentence, and paragraph has been reviewed and rewritten where applicable.  For some chapters, like those involving pattern matching and threading, this resulted in significant changes and revisions.  For a few chapters, the changes are less noticeable.  To answer your question, though, every chapter contains some amount of changes.

Writing the new book didn't just involve adding content, we need to refine and refactor content to match the Java 21 exam.  This also meant streamlining/simplifying topics that don't feature as prominently on the exam anymore.
Thanks all for having us at our "home away from home"!
If it helps, we've already updated this table in the OCP 21 book to include the prefix "Arrays." before the method name, for greater clarity in each row.

Campbell Ritchie wrote:Please consider adding your name here.



Good idea (for my cert results), hopefully I formatted the table correctly!
6 months ago