Chapter 4.
Wow!
I thought I knew everything, in fact, I thought most of it could be answered from what I knew before/outside of
Java.
If the questions are realistic, I can see that they could take the longest of any questions on the
test and be voted most likely to be skipped if short on time!
Anyway, we aren't supposed to be approaching the book as novice programmers or even novice Java users, but I still think there is a high percentage of tricky stuff in the end of chapter questions that isn't covered until later chapters, at least chapter 5. For one thing, Arrays and ArrayLists abound in all their glory in the Chapter 4 questions.
But why I am posting this is that when I put together the test to take online, intending to have practice in a somewhat similar format to the actual test, Question 20 from the book (one of the easier ones!) showed no code snippet at all, just the answers. I was ready to guess "Lorne Michaels", "Abraham Lincoln" or "Tunisia".
I think I saw some comment saying that the book authors don't really have direct control of the supplementary materials including the test questions, but that was frustrating.
Another oddity that I noticed, on all the tests I tried so far, running in a standard, up-to-date Google Chrome browser on Windows 10, is that pieces of "code font" embedded in answers render way smaller than the surrounding text.
Something like
The answer is unreadable d
ue to this phenomenon.
I don't know if you indeed have any control at all over that, but I didn't think it was due to odd browser or computer configuration on my part and I already got at least one, probably at least two wrong answers in the first 4 end-of-chapters (and a few on the Assessment if I recall correctly) due to that weirdness. In the future I will break out the magnify tool before plunging into the darkness.
I have an engineering degree from an all-scholarship school that was painfully difficult, and I've played some really hard games, but if the sample problems accurately reflect difficulty of 815 questions, the test is pretty hard! Sure, if you could take all day on them, but from what I've heard you can't afford to dawdle on the 819....hmmm...
Anyway, thanks for a great book. I felt several questions were only readily answerable using information not yet found in the text by the end of Chapter 4, but mostly you just need to really work fast and keep a clear head. Thanks again.
Jesse