Hi everyone,
I've just finished my 1Z0-819 exam passing it with a score of 82%.
First of all I want to thank for Scott and Jane for their excellent study guides and for their blog posts. Their work is the most reliable source on the internet if anyone wants to pass this exam.
My background: I work as a full stack developer using Java for the back-end. I have 4+ years experience in full-stack development plus a few years of doing coding in C++.
Initially I bought a voucher to be able to register for 1Z0-815 in the end of the summer, also planning to do the 1Z0-816 next year. Unfortunately I had to delay my exam for a while. When I finally registered, I found out that my exam purchase was automatically promoted to 1Z0-819 and also my purchase is valid until 31 December (today). So I had to re-plan everything.
My learning path:
-initially I went trough the OCP Oracle Certified Professional Java SE 11 Programmer I Study Guide. I've done all the tests from Wiley Efficient Learning.
-I bought the 1Z0-815 test bundle from whizlabs.com. They were certainly ok, but they also have a lot of questions which may seem out of topic. Also I've noticed that the type parameters are missing from some questions' source code, but being a bundle for 1Z0-815, it was not that of a big deal.
-finding out that my exam was promoted to 1Z0-819, I've bought the second book for Java SE 11 Programmer II. I've done all the tests from Wiley Efficient Learning for programmer II as well.
-I also bought the 1Z0-816 test bundle from whizlabs, but I found to be borderline unusable since all the type parameters are removed from the questions making a lot of them unsolvable. I've contacted them a few times, it seems they do not really care respond. So please avoid this bundle.
While this passing result certainly makes me happy, I'm also somewhat disappointed about the structure of this exam:
- 90 minutes is a bit short for this exam. I think having 120 minutes would be the ideal solution here. I managed to finish all the questions in 65-70 minutes, but I marked for review a lot of them. In the end I managed to revisit all of those marked, but certainly I did not have time to go through every question again.
- for the JDBC question I had a callable statement with 2 parameters and with setObject. For everyone, who is still learning, please don't skip this part from the book.
- I had a question with doPrivileged. It was mainly related to a potential vulnerability, this article covers everything we need to know:
https://www.selikoff.net/2020/11/05/819-security/
- most of my questions were class design, generics and streams
Some tips which I found useful:
- if the question has a lot of source code in it, read the answers first and focus on the lines mentioned by the potential answer choices
- if the answers don't have a "Does not compile" choice, don't focus on proving to yourself whatever the code compiles or not. Just focus on the lines mentioned by any potential answers.
- watch the clock, skip the long questions and come back later.