Simon Miller

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since Aug 05, 2018
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Recent posts by Simon Miller

I think you'd have a very hard time finding anything legitimately obtained from Oracle or whoever writes the questions. I would say though that some questions I got on the OCA exam were extremely similar to some from Enthuware's question banks.

I don't work for Enthuware or anything but I can assure you that if you're familiar with the structure and complexity level of the questions used in Enthuware then the exam won't throw anything unexpected at you.
Congratulations Philippe, that's a great score!

Just wondering, did you just use Boyarsky/Selikoff chapters 1-10 and no other study material? And if so, did anything come up in the exam that you weren't familiar with?
5 years ago

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:Congrats Simon! Note that the OCP is a lot harder than the OCA.

Have a cow for putting the pass date in code .



Duly noted! Thanks for the cow and even more so for the excellent OCA guide!  
5 years ago
My brain is currently processing all dates in this way  

Here's a short rundown of my road to the test:

I started with Sierra and Bates' OCA guide and then moved onto Enthuware. The first couple of Enthuware attempts went poorly so I decided to try a new book. The next book I read was the OCA guide by Jeanne Boyarsky and Scott Selikoff. Reading a second book (and writing a lot more code) really helped to steady the ship for me. I had improved with the end-of-chapter questions and the digital material from both books so I moved back to Enthuware. Here are all my Enthuware scores and exam result:

Foundation Test :64%
Test 1: 56%
Test 2: 79%
Test 3: 67%
Test 4: 83%
Test 5: 67%
Test 6: 84%
Test 7: 79%
Last Day Test : 87%

Actual exam score: 92%

I found the exam to be quite tough. I think I had read so many times online that "The real exam is much easier than Enthuware" that I bought into it a little too much. Enthuware is tougher but not by a huge margin in my opinion. The testing software was very similar to Enthuware and quite nice to use, one grievance I have is that the screen was a little too small in my local test center. I had to scroll up and down at times but that's a small complaint really.

Thanks to the other members who have answered my questions in the last couple of weeks and hopefully this post is useful to someone.

On to OCP!  


5 years ago
Thanks for that answer Jeanne.  
I'm not sure how to approach a few questions that I've come across on Enthuware, below is an example of one such question:



It does actually throw a StringIndexOutOfBoundsException but that's not the right answer to the question. I understand the explanation in that the String class itself throws an IndexOutOfBoundsException for this method but really I'not sure how far I should follow this line of thinking when approaching the questions in the exam which I'm due to take next Friday.

Should I memorize exactly which methods throw which exception in the API as opposed to the subexceptions that they throw when run? Can anyone who has done the exam let me know if the OCA questions are similar to this?

Congrats! That's a great score.

Did anything unexpected come up? And on your fast completion  time, did you go back to check everything once you had them all answered or were you confident after your first run?
5 years ago

Ganesh Patekar wrote:Simon Miller,
Welcome to CodeRanch!    will you please QuoteYourSources ? ( Sybex online material Or text book etc )so this thread will be useful for others too, who may face same problem.

Vyacheslav Belenky, best of luck for the exam.



Thanks for the welcome. The question being referred to is part of the online tool that's bundled with Boyarsky and Selikoff's 'OCA: Oracle Certified Associate Java SE 8 Programmer I Study Guide: Exam 1Z0-808'. It appeared as question 32 in the second 60-question mock exam.
Thanks for the reassurance Vyacheslav, I was pretty sure it was a mistake after running it but I've had trouble with String/StringBuilder comparisons so I second guessed myself.

Best of luck for tomorrow!  
Hello all,

I just came across this question earlier and was racking my brain trying to figure it out. I understand that equals() is not overridden in StringBuilder, so the references are compared and should return false as they're two different objects. So I can't see how this would produce two (after the non-compiling line is removed).



I ran this and commented the third if statement. It didn't produce any output.

Am I missing something?