Brecht Geeraerts

Congrats to all winners!!

Also congratulations to Hanumant for his book. It has been a while since I have seen a book promotion triggering so many questions!  

If you want, you can add your name to the certification wall of fame.  

Hi Olivier,

Welcome to the Ranch.  

The exam "helps" you by indicating how many correct answers are expected. If you tick only 2 out of 3, you won't get any points (if my understanding is correct).

Are you new to programming in general? Or just to Java as a language? The certification exams can be quite tough so allow yourself sufficient time to get a deep understanding of Java and OOP. Luckily there are some great resources available to help you succeed.

That is very unfortunate indeed. I must say that (luckily) I have never encountered such a problem myself. Even though it has been a while, wouldn't it be possible to get a new book? It is obvious that this error was there since the beginning...

Congrats, JavaJames. :-)

I like it. It has a nice modern look.  

Hi folks,

I have a question regarding the OCP 8 exam: does the exam focus on both java.io (input/output streams) as well as NIO2? Or is there a stronger emphasis on either one of the two? Just wondering...

For the OCA exam, I believe I had 150 minutes (if my memory is not letting me down)

Hi Ana,

Can you show us the code of what you have already tried yourself so far? What is working and where do you get stuck?

Hi Zachery. Welcome to the Ranch! May I please ask you to reformat your code using the code tags? This will make it easier for people to read and understand your code.

This sounds a lot like how I got a job as a jr developer consultant. I learned Java on my own, along with the concepts of OOP and algorithms. Enough to pass the technical interview. I will still have a 3-month in-house training course to follow (focussing on Java EE, Spring, etc) but all of us are required to get the OCA and OCP certificates within our first year.

What happens if you specify the type of list you are passing to the method?

private void setVampirePositions(List<Vampire> vampireList){   for (Vampire v: vampireList){        // do something   } }

In the code that I have come across, I almost never see it specified.

Like Stephan I can't access your code either.

Indeed. Well done. What indexOf() does is it looks for the first occurrence of the forward slash. The inner if statement checks whether the first occurrence is at index 4 or index 5. Neither are correct hence the reason it returns false.

Using lastIndexOf() is a good solution. Another solution is to use an overloaded version of indexOf(), namely the one that takes two parameters. That one allows you to specify an index as of which the search must start.
... geoDate.indexOf('/', 3)   // starts looking for the first occurrence as of index position 3 onwards ...