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OCPJP Java 8 Jeanne Boyarsky & Scott Selikoff (Exam guide book)

 
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First of all, when I see this book promotion I had a rapturous glance. I read your first book Java OCA 8 Programmer I Study Guide which was neat & nice. Narrator was much capable of getting reader attention without breaking it out. Zipping all necessary facts into 6 chapters is impressive.

I'm just about to face my OCA exam in few weeks. I think its better to continue to OCP without getting much delay. Because those base concepts should be thoroughly understood for OCP exam. (I believe, but sometimes this book has a magic for that problem as well )

But there were few drawbacks on your OCA exam guide. (This is completely from a personal perspective) When I try out enthuware mock exams I encounted some questions which were not covered in OCA exam guide book.
TemporalAccessor - I never heard about this interface from OCA book. But I got questions in ethuware mock tests.
Casting between different wrappers and primitives. (Better if you included most tricky conversions)

Candidates should be well familiar with lambdas for OCPJP. Most of the developers who starts with only Java never had much exposure to lambdas till Java 8. I strongly believe this book would be capable to cater the readers by covering all the necessary areas for the OCPJP exam.

Good Luck with your promotion! I'd love to see how the next big thing would feed my lambda hunger


Anyways, I got a question in Java 8 interfaces. Many tutors states that in Java 8 you would have **default** methods which contain a default behavior for methods.
Very first question which popped up in my head was, then why the world we have abstract classes ? We can achieve the same thing what we are looking for using Abstract classes. isn't it?

Regards,
Jude
 
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Wow, a lot to respond to... First, glad you liked the OCA book, hopefully you'll enjoy thr OCP new book!

The books, being primarily study guides, are focused on the exam objectives, so our OCA book only had a small section of lambada expressions since the OCA exam doesn't require a great depth of knowledge on that topic. Alternatively, the OCP exam uses lambda and streams throughout numerous APIs. Chapter 4 is entirely devoted to streams and primitive streams, since the exam expects you to know them well. Chapters 7 (Concurrency) and 9 (NIO.2) for example, show you how to use lambdas and streams to execute powerful commands with only a small amount of code. For instance, using streams to search for files in a directory is far easier (and more concise) than using the NIO.2 FileVisitor interface. In other words, I'm sure you'll get your lambda fill in the new book!

For default methods, do you mean default interface methods? While I agree they do blur the line between interfaces and abstract classes, you have to remember that one of the primary reasons to create a default interface method is for backwards compatibility. For example, let's say you create a new version of an existing interface with a new abstract method and place it in a JAR someone else is using. Without a default method, the consumers of your interface class would immediately break, as they are missing an abstract method in their implementation class. Default interface methods provide a way for them to use the updated shared interface without having to recompile or rebuild their code.

As for exam questions, it can't hurt to study more. We actively encourage you to create your own classes and "play" with the new features of Java 8 as much as possible. Since it's against policy (and copyright) to reproduce actual exam questions, our book (and online material) represents our own questions that we feel will best prepare you for the exam, aka no two mock exam providers are going to have the exact same questions. We tried to make them more challenging than the real exam, such as not telling you how many answers are correct for some question, in the hopes that the harder the practice questions, the better you'll do on he exam.

Good luck on both exams. If you are an experienced Java developer, I suspect you won't find the OCA 8 exam difficult at all. On the other hand, the OCP 8 exam is quite challenging given the breadth of material, so I recommend studying a lot for that one! Best wishes and good luck!
 
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Jude Niroshan wrote:But there were few drawbacks on your OCA exam guide. (This is completely from a personal perspective) When I try out enthuware mock exams I encounted some questions which were not covered in OCA exam guide book.
TemporalAccessor - I never heard about this interface from OCA book. But I got questions in ethuware mock tests.
Casting between different wrappers and primitives. (Better if you included most tricky conversions)


These aren't covered in our book because they aren't on the OCA. Only the basics of casting are on teh OCA. And the TemporalAccessors are on the OCP, not the OCA.
 
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Hi!

I prepared myself for the OCAJP8 reading your book and it was straightforward, thanks! I hope it will be the same with this new one.

Will I have access to the pdf version of the book if I buy the paperback one? I prefer to study with a physical book but having the digital version is very useful as I can read it as well when commuting.

Good luck
 
Scott Selikoff
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The book is available in Paperback and Kindle form. If you prefer a digital copy, we recommend you buy the Kindle version.
 
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