Alex Khvatov

Hello authors,

Based on what you currently see in the industry, is it really worth getting Java certified anymore?
Do you get (positive) feedback from the folks who got certified and it helped them land a job/promotion?

Regards,
Alex

Scott Selikoff wrote: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.

Thank you so much for your answer.

Hello authors,
I am currently Java 5 - certified Programmer and Web component developer certifications holder. I am very interested in upgrading to the latest certification. Can your book be used as the only source for the certification preparation? If not, what materials would you recommend?

Regards,
Alex

Hello Marcello,

Do you cover in your book big data search optimization techniques?

Regards,
Alex

Hello Dean,

In your opinion, with deprecation of implicit conversions in Scala 3, do you think it better for newcomers to learn 'extension methods and givens' or one should still start with learning implicit conversions in order to work with Spark (I don't think Spark will migrate to Scala 3 quickly enough) and later move to Scala 3?
Do you compare the two (implicit conversion and givens) in your book?

Regards,
Alex

Hi Dean,
thank you for answering my previous question. Here is another one.
While '_' symbol in Scala was certainly overloaded (imports and placeholders), in Scala 3 to be replaced with *.

What is the main reason for the replacement of '_' with '*'?

To me - this makes Scala more Java-like

Regards,
Alex

Hello Dean.

Do you think positional formatting is going to be widely adopted with version 3 of Scala?
Is this an attempt to lure Python programmers into the world of Scala?

Regards,
Alex

Thank you for answering my previous question.
I have another one:

If pandas library is single threaded, working partitioned data would not bring any benefits; the data would still be accessed sequentially and not in parallel manner, right?

Basically I am trying to find a good use case to use pandas vs Spark.

Regards,
Alex

Hello Ana,
I am very new to pandas library, but not new to Spark. Here is my question:
Since Spark is written (mostly) in Scala, does an application performance written in Python suffer from having to convert Scala datatypes to Python and back?

Regards,
Alex

Thank you

Hello Paul,

I have been always wondering if to be truly successful in programming one needs to have a CS (Computer Science) degree.
What is your opinion regarding this?

Regards,
Alex

Hello Yehonathan,
Could you provide a good example where Data-Oriented programming would NOT be a good choice for a coding style?

Regards,
Alex

Thank you.

Hello Samer,
Could you describe a use case where GraphQL API would NOT be a good choice?

Thanks,
Alex

Hello Amy and Mark,
I looked in the TOC of the book. Does the 'platform' you are using in the book (Spark and Neo4j) require a certain version of Spark (let's ay >2.0) or any (1.6, for example) could be used? Do you have a 'platform' - a VM stored somewhere or a Docker we can download?

Regards,
Alex