Ervin Szilagyi

I did no see anybody talk about AWS certificates in Coderanch forums. Since I've seen many Java developers take this exam and probably many more are willing to take this exam, I think my giving talking about my experience may help or probably inspire others.

About me: I'm an Oracle certified Java 11 Programmer (I talked about my experience here: (https://coderanch.com/t/737860/certification/Exam-Feedback) and I'm also a Microsoft Certified Azure Developer (don't ask me why). As a software engineer I have around 2 years of experience working on AWS (using mainly Java). After I passed my 1Z0-819 exam, I decided to finally start working on my AWS Developer certificate.

As a learning guide I've used mainly Stephane Maarek's Udemy course, which is fantastic. I liked how the course was organized. There were focus on some potential obscure questions which may come up in the exam (example: how to login from the command line into ECR and push a docker image using both v1 and v2 versions of AWS CLI). Since this was a video course I decided to take my own notes (even if Stephane provides his notes as a downloadable content). I felt taking notes helped me memorize stuff more easily.
I also had access to the AWS Certified Developer Official Study Guide (https://www.amazon.com/Certified-Developer-Official-Study-Guide/dp/1119508193) book from Sybex. While this book may be great for a lot of people, I found it to be all over the place. Since it has a bunch of authors, the style of how the material is explained if different from going from one chapter to another.
For practice tests I bough the one from tutorialsdojo. They are widely acclaimed around the internet, and I must admit, they are pretty good. I also bought the practice tests from whizlabs, which were OK, although I have mixed feelings about buying from them.

The exam itself luckily did not provide any surprises. It has 65 questions, the majority being single choice from 4 potential answers, but it also has some questions with multiple choice answers. The time to complete these questions is 140 minutes with the possibility to request 30 minutes extra for non English speakers.  The passing score is around 720 points from 1000. I went through all the questions in 30 minutes flagging probably half of them, and I spent an extra 30 minutes by coming back to the ones flagged. In total I finished in an hour, so there was no time pressure. I got a score of 947, which is ok, I guess...

As an exam tip which worked for better than expected is to read the question and just try to exclude wrong answers. Usually we are able to exclude 2 choices from the potential 4, which puts us in a pretty good position to be able to answer correctly. During the exam the questions and answers seemed straight-forward, I didn't really felt that the somebody was trying to trick me (like in case of OCP exam).

I hope these thoughts may help or at least motivate others.

Jeanne said she was also learning for AWS Solution Architect Associate exam, which by itself is a huge topic. Because an  OCP exam has a lot of stuff which you have to memorize (APIs, command line commands with arguments) and you don't use them every day on the job, it is understandable that you forgot some material. Doing a lot of preparation just before the exam is and focusing just on the OCP material is a helps a lot. Jeanne also said she was focusing on the questions in order to give feedback to the readers and assess if their current printed material is still valid for the preparation.

Besides, people are different, some can memorize abstract concepts more easily than others, other people can solve practical questions having fewer difficulties. Nevertheless, the exam will test you on both.

82% is certainly a good score, but so is 72% and basically every score above 68%. Also, there are other people who achieved beyond 90%, but this should not really matter in the end. You have to answer 34 questions correctly from 50 in order to become certified, which is certainly possible.

Tom Huynh wrote:Thanks for your extensive insights.

Just to be clear. You mentioned you have 4+ year of full-stack development.
How many years was Java development. Also the full 4+ years or just a part?

I am asking this because I just started with Java development actually. Going for the OCP would take a long time for me, but I am willing to take that road. Easy does it (is my mantra).

I started working as a full-stack developer (Java/Spring/Angular) at the end of 2016. Just to be clear here, your experience as a developer would matter in cases were you have to read and understand code. I don't think that you have to have years of experience as a developer in order to pass this exam. If you do enough preparation and invest sufficient enough time in learning and even memorizing some of the APIs required for the exam, you would pass without issues.

According to Oracle it is recommended to have 2-3 years of experience for an OCP exam. This should not discourage anybody. I know a some companies which pay for OCA-OCP certifications for junior developers who just started to work in the fields. Usually they pass without major difficulties.  

Scott Selikoff wrote:Congratulations!!  That's excellent news!  And a great score to boot.

Per the comment about Callable statement... they aren't supposed to be in scope.  It's possible you got an experimental question.  Not all questions on an exam count toward your score.

I was thinking about this as well. I got 50 questions in total with that one being the only one having anything to do with JDBC. The final report mentions that I was able to answer correctly the questions related to JDBC.
I might be a ungraded question, I don't know.

I've also received my badge today: https://www.youracclaim.com/badges/d24ba586-7589-488b-ac86-2b5ae49e994a?

Pretty cool!

Tom Huynh wrote:Impressive score, congratulations and thanks for the practical tips and the learning path insights.

It seems that you only used the OCP I & II Study Guides. Is that true?

Can you tell something about  the practising part?  What  was your learning/practising ratio for example?

Thank you.

Yes, I used OCP I & II Study Guides. I bought both of them, although there is a a complete edition now containing the material from both books in one. When I ordered the first book, I didn't know that the exams will be merged. So, I had to order the second one separately as well.

I studied for around 8 weeks for the exam. I spend an average 2 hours per day, mainly after work. I spent around 2 weeks for the OCP I material, afterwards I moved to OCP II. A went through every chapter from each book, after each chapter I've done the questions. I used SybexTest (https://www.efficientlearning.com/) for the questions after each chapter.

After I finished the second book, I've done the Assessment Test and the bonus exams. I've re-read the chapters where I struggled the most with the questions (mainly io, nio2 and modularization). As I said I started to solve the exams from whizlabs, but I did not finished all of them, since a lot of the questions where very low quality.

I've spent around 40% studying and reading the books (and sometimes the Oracle Java documentation as well). I've spent around 60% doing mock exams. Yes, this implies doing at least twice the questions from SybexTest, but lets be honest, they have 460 questions just for OCP II book, so you cant really memorize all of them.

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.