Elisabeth Robson

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since May 14, 2004
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I'm co-author of four books in the Head First Series, co-founder of WickedlySmart, and co-author of OCP Java SE 8 Programmer II Exam Guide.
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Recent posts by Elisabeth Robson

No curly brace wars people! The risk to life and limb isn't worth it....
Congrats!! Yes thank you so much for all your great questions this week, we really appreciate the chance to talk about the book.

Elisabeth
The McGrawhill OCA8 and OCP8 study guides are split into two separate books (one book got too big) so if you have OCA/P7 from Sierra & Bates, be aware that there are now two books:

OCA8 Study Guide by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates
and
OCP8 Study Guide by Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates, and me (Elisabeth Robson)

Regarding which books, I personally feel like the more the better so when I'm studying I generally pick up multiple titles -- obviously the expense of the books can be a limitation though. I think if you read Jeanne's book plus our McGrawhill books you'd be well prepared!

Elisabeth
Well we didn't do that... so you'll need to study the objectives for the upgrade and the objectives for OCP8 and do that yourself (you can use the handy objectives table in the intro for OCP8 and the online objectives for upgrade for comparison).

For those items NOT on the OCP 8 exam that ARE in the upgrade, you can find those listed in the introduction (there are basically only a handful) and the appendix for more details.


Hi At,
No we didn't dedicate chapters to the upgrade so you'll have to dig through the objectives to see which chapters (and sections) you'll need to read from the new book to cover everything.

Elisabeth
Yes, think of lambda as a short hand for a class that implements a functional interface
I'm not sure I understand either.

A functional interface must have one abstract method.
Campbell, that is true... In my test code I tested with getClass() and saw ArrayList but doesn't mean it's guaranteed. My conclusion was that the concrete type allowed the object to be stored in the array, while the abstract type of the Arrays.asList() result did not, but I could very well be wrong!

And correct that it *could* return another concrete type of List in some implementations...

Ahmed,
Hopefully Bert will chime in on this one as he has more experience than I do with the "tricks" on the exam.

Certainly there is a bit of overlap in the objectives -- it's worth a few minutes to look at the OCA 8 and OCP 8 objectives to see what those are -- and of course you'll be expected to know loop constructs and operators and other material covered in OCA 8 on the OCP exam to some extent. I would like to hope there's no tricks (in that the question looks like an OCP question but turns out to rely on something from OCA) but I certainly wouldn't guarantee that.

Most of the overlaps in objectives we found in sections 1 and 2 of the OCP objectives.

Hope that helps!

Elisabeth
Hi Femy,
Check out this thread for more: https://coderanch.com/t/694436/certification/OCPJP-Study-Guide-change

The major changes in the OCP8 Study Guide from the OCP7 Part 2 Study Guide all address the new objectives for OCP8. We did remove a couple of things (not much) based on some objectives going away.

Elisabeth
In general you don't want to specify more threads than you have processors/cores.
The Collectors.toList() returns a list with a concrete type: ArrayList.

Arrays.asList() returns an object with the abstract type List.

Attempting to store an object of type List fails. If you change the code to use the concrete type, it'll work, as you see in line 18.

Would this book just cover only the topics asked in the exam?



We like to say we cover 115% - hopefully that's the case. So we cover what's on the exam, plus a little bit extra.

Would you cover all the topics available in Java 8 - like a quick reference guide for the Java 8 changes or topics?



Definitely not; we really focus in on the objectives for the exam and everything we cover is related to those topics.

Would you cover the topics in the beginner perspective or advanced too?



I'd say we cover the topics from an intermediate perspective; we do assume you've been programming in Java--hopefully you're not taking the exam as a newbie Java programmer--but we try to cover the topics we do tackle in a way that you can learn it if you haven't come across that language feature before.

Hope that helps!

Elisabeth
Hi Jonathan,
Yes I think it would work fine for you to use the book with other resources; you certainly can open to a specific chapter or even specific section and probably be fine picking up at that point, although you may find that we rely on previous examples or code developed to a certain point in a section. As Campbell suggests, take a look at the table of contents and that should give you an idea of how we break up the topics. We use the exam objectives to guide the content structure to some degree although there is some mixing of content from different objectives sections in say, one chapter, where it makes sense.

Elisabeth