Passed OCAJP

[harsh asnani]

Passed OCAJP 8 with 92%.
Pretty sure would have gotten a perfect score if the following had not happened:
My exam was scheduled on Monday and my test center was in a different city. It started raining very heavily and all modes of transportation from my city to test city center were shut except this one train which left on Sunday night and reached Monday morning at 5. The exam was at 12pm. Was not able to reschedule or cancel the exam online because I had approved accommodations for the exam and it had to be done over the phone. Customer service was not available because of weekend. Somehow got on the train which reached the station at 10.45am(more than 5hrs late), went directly to the test center with two hours of sleep the previous night. 20 questions into the exam and I was half asleep. Managed to complete the exam 45 minutes before time but was way too sleepy to make a review.

The mistakes that I might have made as far as I can remember and by the feedback given: 1.Using class accessor for instance members(A.x, where A is a class and x is its instance field) 2.Not spotting use of this() as the first non-commented statement 3.Finally block trying to access a variable declared in try 4.Nested ternary expression evaluation

Preparation included OCA Sybex study guide by Jeanne Boyarsky and Scott Selikoff. Mock tests by Enthuware(score range 76%-89%). 3 months preparation with previous coding experience in python, c,c++ but a gap of 3 years.

Currently studying for the OCP exam with the same material. Aim to give the exam in 3 months. Any thoughts/advice?

Thanks.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Harsh,
Congrats! The OCP is much tougher than the OCA. You sound like you are in good shape though having mastered the OCA part.

[Pete Letkeman]

Great job @harsh asnani. I'm hoping to pass the OCA exam in about a month and I've spent about two months going over a few different people including the one that you mentioned.

Just throwing these ideas out there:
Ask yourself what the rush is to pass the OCP exam. I'm not saying that you should not take the exam, but maybe you want to take a step back and see what you want to do.
- Maybe (like me) you want to get into programming against Android devices. If this is the case then I suggest you look into the Udacity Android/Google certification. Within two months you could be certified for Android development by Google/Udacity (this does require some money).
- Maybe you would like to get into JSP and alike. I think that there are certifications for JSP development (but I could be wrong). If this is the case then you may want to ask some of the JSP certified people what your next best move is.

I do suggest that you take a moment for yourself...maybe at few days or more. Enjoy the fact that you past the test and that you don't have any Java related tests at least for a a few months.

Please remember that I have not passed the OCA test yet, nor have I taken it either. So what I say could be totally irresponsible or wrong as to what you should do next.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Pete,
JSPs are a minor part of web development. You either use a servlet or a framework or pure JavaScript. If you have a book that suggests putting Java code in the JSP, throw it out as it is teaching you bad practices.

[Pete Letkeman]

Good to know.

As I stated I'm going for Android development after I pass OCA.

[harsh asnani]

Jeanne, I would like to specially thank you on your advice during my preparation and the book that you have co-authored. The success of many students including mine has indeed epitomized your book's success.

As a suggestion to readers of this post, if you haven't already bought WhizLab's mock test, please don't. It has a lot of old and redundant questions. Also erroneous to a point where they instantiate an interface and deem it to be legal.

Pete, thanks for your post. My aim in the short term is to code for android as I plan to write algorithms that could realize maximum potential if used on a mobile device which is affordable to everyone. I am aware of the Udacity program that you mention. For what I've researched , the best position to learn android programming and design is to have atleast one year experience in advance Java whose topics are covered in the OCP exam. Also, I want to say this that my long term goal is to get into design/research so I've chosen this path which by the way also includes pursuing a Master's in Computer Science with Theory of Computation as a specialty.
If your goal is to learn to program Android devices and make a career, you should look into Kotlin programming language which google aims to make it as its official programming language for Android at which point Java will not be the official programming language for Android. That doesn't mean Java will be any less powerful to program Android(Kotlin is 100% interoperable with Java) but what it could mean is writing code with Kotlin would be easier than Java for Android. You might want to research a bit on it.

[Pete Letkeman]

@harsh asnani,

I was planning on looking into both Koltin and Scala, but only after I pass the OCA and Udacity tests/certifications.

Now, depending on where exactly you plan on going with your career you may want to look into Hadoop systems. From what I recall there are three major players in Hadoop and knowing Java gives you a leg up and will help you out when working with Hadoop systems. There are free Hadoop virutal systems out there that you can download and use to learn, you just need a strong enough system to run them. Hadoop is for big data, and as you may expect the amount of data being collected every day is enormous.

If you are looking into big data systems then you may want to look into SAP technologies, specifically HANA. Many HANA systems run on systems with two Terra-Bytes of RAM (your heard correctly 2TB) or more Linux systems. However you can also run HANA on Linux systems with 64 GB. Your experience/knowledge with JAVA will come in handy with HANA systems as well. You can use/download HANA for free as well and HANA certification starts at $500 at PearsonVue testing centers.

Or maybe you can take a look into Oracle systems for big data, however I'm not too familiar with many of the products offered by Oracle.