I'm back; so here's my little story (which, I dare hope, will serve as a warning to those who dream about becoming Oracle-certified in a snap). Alright, here it goes:
I started preparing in the earnest six months ago. The first thing I did was quitting my job, quite literally. Which was easy enough because I'm a freelancing translator-
cum-interpreter with degrees both in engineering and linguistics. Nevertheless, it means I stopped earning bread for my family thus making my wife quite unhappy, all in the name of allotting myself as much crunch time as possible.
After burning the proverbial bridges behind me I watched… no, that's a wrong
word; I worked painstakingly through the entire video course on 1Z0-803 by Simon Roberts. Was spending on that ten to twelve hours daily. Took me three weeks; no holidays, no weekends, no nothing… Why this long? Because I was hitting Pause every few seconds to write notes, think over what was Simon talking about and, most importantly, put all of it out in code. By using Notepad++. Yes, that's right. For the first two months I wasn't letting myself fire up an
IDE (I use both NetBeans and Android Studio; I do write simple Android-based apps and even sell them through Google Store; however strange it may sound, people are buying and not complaining. Curious…)
Soon running my puny programs - I call them 'javalets' - directly from the CLI became so tedious that I hacked the Registry and wrote a minimalist launcher to run the code by right-clicking on the .java file in the Explorer window. This trick alone allowed me to write and
test well over a hundred javalets a day, all the while learning new, even more mind-boggling rules from the JLS.
By my rough estimation, by the mid-January, 2016, I had thought up, tested, twisted, tortured, tormented, and otherwise tweaked with over 3,000 javalets while listening to and watching Simon. (Mind you, not because watching him makes you do all those unspeakable things, no. He did an outstanding work. The best there's. I'm going to write an extensive review about his video course, although not right now. Right now I don't have the right. Right…)
And then I hit the books. Oh boy, did I hit 'em… Here's the list:
- the ubiquitous
OCA: Oracle Certified Associate Java SE 8 Programmer I Study Guide. Exam 1Z0-808 by Jeanne Boyarsky & Scott Selikoff (loved it; positively loved it! granted, it's ridden with typos but still makes a great read; in fact, THE greatest);
-
OCA Java SE 7 by Mala Gupta (liked it, especially all those tightly packed Review Notes; her new book, this time on 1Z0-808, will be released very soon, btw; definitely am going to read it);
-
Head First Java by Kathy Sierra & Bert Bates (dropped it after a couple of weeks; reason: the delivery grated on my nerves; in my eyes, it'll make a perfect present to one's worst enemy but that's just me; anyhow, all my comments are highly subjective);
-
Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel (6th ed.) (not everything, of course; I didn't touch collections, inner classes, threads, and other advanced topics that are not on the exam; I am awed by this book; a few pieces of code resemble poems, even; then again, it's just me);
- few chapters from
Effective Java by Joshua Bloch (am going to read it ten more times; pure pleasure);
-
Java 8. Pocket Guide by Robert & Patricia Liguori (I always keep this book within my reach and consult with it dozens of times daily);
-
Java in a Nutshell by Benjamin Evans & David Flanagan (6th ed., which covers JSE8) (I think I did find a typo in their code but the book itself is undeniably excellent; helped me to look at certain concepts from a different angle; would love to translate it if I only had a chance…);
-
Exercices en Java par Claude Delannoy (4e éd., couvre JSE8 aussi) (I certainly enjoyed it; would've gladly recommended it to any of my friends);
-
La programmation objet en Java par Michel Divay (apparently, he teaches this very course at the Univ.of Rennes; the book itself is as dry as moon dust and bo-oring but it has one major advantage: it makes use of simple UML diags, which I find helpful when solving problems);
- and three more books in Russian, which are too obscure to talk about here.
Naturally, just reading books won't cut it so I did exercises. As Jeanne Boyarsky loves to repeat, "Practice!" And so I practiced. It looked like this: read Chapter 1, do the exercises to that Chapter, do not check answers but read Chapter 2 instead, come back and repeat the exercises to Chapter 1, compare your own answers (to see if they are the same, otherwise it would mean that you are unsure about certain points) and finally check them against the key. Loop in the same fashion to finish the book. Cover all the books that have exercises. Then do it again and again until your score becomes at least 90% at every single pass.
Boyarsky & Selikoff's book alone contains 345 exercises if we count in the three mock up exams; I did the whole cycle three times (and read the book itself four times, from cover to cover; now I'm reading it for the fifth time; I did quit my job, remember?). Mala Gupta's book gives a lot of practice, as well…
I also enrolled for a month-long course on Java 8 that they teach at Bauman's Technical Univ. here, in downtown Moscow. Three hours of brain wracking practice in class, then solving all those home assignments until four o'clock in the morning. For twenty days.
Attended JPoint, a Java conference for students organized by the local JUG. Was reading all Java-related magazines I could get my hands on in all the languages I'm familiar with. Sat for hours cracking Java Interview questions that can be found on so many sites in India…
You see, the goal was to saturate myself with Java code, until I puke blood or drop dead. Or both. Didn't happen, though.
This epic picture will not be complete without me squinting at my screen while working through emulated exams; I had plenty of those, too:
- two 60-question-long practice exams that are bundled with
OCA SE7 Programmer I & II by Kathy Sierra, et al.
- over 600 questions in the Enthuware Question Bank
- Kaplan Self-Test with its 180 questions
- as for the testing software that comes with the B&S book, I stopped using it after seeing how many errors it contains; preferred pen and paper instead.
Kathy Sierra's quizzes are tough. Enthuware's even harder - and thoroughly enjoyable. Crème de la crème if you pardon my French. The
explanations alone are worth the buck; they are first rate, hands down.
As for Kaplan's… I wish I could sue that sorry bunch. Their so-called 'self-test' (for which I paid over $80 and which is even advertised on the Pearson Vue's site as a part of the Official Oracle Certification Bundle, of all things) is the worst piece of software workmanship that I have ever seen in my entire life - and I started coding in 1973, at the tender age of eleven. Which makes me old enough to claim the right to pass judgment. Hopefully…
Am going to write a scathing review on Kaplan's 1Z0-808 prepware. If not on their own site, then at least on Amazon.com.
In case someone is curious why I resent them that much, here’re the reasons; there are two of them… hold it! three! Firstly, the desktop version's GUI is full of visual bugs that literally clutter the screen (seriously!) and it is only the web-based version that works as advertised. Secondly, their flash
cards contain errors and ambiguities in the explanations, and finally, the questions are simply… well, too simple. I took their mock up exam in the so-called Certification Mode and got 96%. Without breaking a sweat, with tons of time to spare, without even reviewing my answers… How about that, huh?
Needless to say, I stopped working with this travesty right away. I've no words for it… It's a pink-colored kindergarten, that's what it is. Kiddies stuff. While what we're talking about here isn't even a live fire drill. It's a full-blown combat zone. In a way.
Now, about Enthuware. My scores were 77% on Foundation, 74-79-75-81-74-80 on Standard Tests 1 thru 6, and 78% on the Last Day Test. The Enthuware developers have a sort of a running scoreboard on their site; it says that the average Standard Tests score from thousands of users is 74.8% while the actual exam score is 88%. My avscore was 77.2… so I thought I had this exam, this damned 1Z0-808 thingy in my pocket… Over 800 hours of reading, plus coding, plus cracking puzzles, plus almost 9000 lines of review notes that weren't merely copied&pasted from anywhere but were indeed my own brainchildren… Notes to myself. Remember this, remember that… 'Watch out for the wrappers' constructors! they accept either underlying primitives or Strings only!"… "Be on guard for trim()! StringBuilder doesn't have it!"… "switch accepts compile-time constants only!"… Stuff like that. Even earned myself the 'dry eye' syndrome because of watching too many Simon Roberts videos, so now I'm dragging my sorry derrière around wiping tears from the corner of my right eye every few seconds. Like a fool. All those efforts… down the drain…
How do you call it? this strange, hollow feeling when you know, with a cold, calm, even serene and contented certainty know that you gave everything humanly possible - and yet it wasn't enough?
Do not worry, I am about to finish. I think I know what my problem was and still is. Am going to test this hypothesis next time, around June 17. Will report both the results and my findings.
Thanks for listening.
Signing off for now.
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