K. Golbie

I read this book http://www.amazon.de/Certified-Professional-Programmer-1Z0-804-1Z0-805/dp/1430247649/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1394963481&sr=8-4&keywords=ocjp which is I guess the only one containing Java 7 topics (for some reasons the Kathy Sierra book is not available for Java 7).

There are also 2,5 mock tests (90 + 90 + 45) contained in the book. One week before the exam I bought 30 days accout from Kaplan (69 $) which is Oracle certified partner for java training. Nevertheless, the real exam was much more harder than my preparation! There were many many questions about streams (IO + NIO) and the "old style" concurrency (especially, multithreading questions leading to the data race, proper locking of the shared resources ...). There were also very tricky questions about formatting (printf, %2$s, ...).

But finally I managed the exam and achieved 81%. I would recommend to code as much as possible and try to solve the edge cases. Maybe there are some better exam questions sources than those I used. Can you recommend some of them ... maybe I will need them for Java 8 upgrade (hopefully Java 8 will come soon ;-)).

So long
golbie

hi Jeanne,

thanks for your answer. I already worked with JSP, Servlets and so on. I would like to learn new stuff. Is there something more "up-to-date" like for instance MVC frameworks (like play framework...) or Cloud Computing?

thanks

hi Jeanne,

thanks for your feedback. I like your blog and will use it as reference for my preparation.

Well, I started learning Java in 2001. I have lots of experience (Java SE, Swing, Tomcat, Jetty, Axis2, Design patterns, UML, ...) so that I think that I'll manage it.

Regarding prices: sorry I just rounded the prices. The price for my first exam was actually 285 Euro.

Which Oracle Course do you recommend? I don't like any boring stuff. Actually I would prefer some brand new topics like Cloud Computing (Openshift,...) but there is nothing like that: http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getpage?page_id=245#2

What do you think?

thanks
golbie

hello there,

I just passed the OCA exam (1Z0-803) with 98% score. Currently I'm preparing myself for the OCP exam (1Z0-804). Afterwards I would like to start the Architect Certification as described here:

http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getpage?page_id=458&get_params=p_track_id:OCMJEE6EA

Do I have to take part in an Oracle Course (virtual class or similar)? Are there really three exams to be passed?

Does anybody have experiences with the whole certification path? What about the costs? Am I right with this calculation:

1x course (about 1000 euro)
3x exam (about 3x300 euro = 900 euro)

Sorry, I read the FAQ list but it seems to be obsolet (it's still about Sun rather than Oracle...).

By the way: is this certification worth of the effort? Do I learn much and is it valuable for the employers?

Thank you for your support.
K. Golbang