Thinking about OCP 17 after passing OCA 8

[Mario Mateaș]

I've recently passed the Oracle Certified Associate Java SE 8 Programmer exam with an 88% thanks to your study guide, and thought about continuing with the Professional exam. Although, instead of still taking OCP for Java 8, I thought it would be a better idea to take the latest exam, intended for Java 17.

It is, indeed, more difficult to do so, not only because of the fact that Java 17 has more things included (and which I need to learn), but the Java 17 only has one exam (this being the OCP), which includes both OCA- and OCP-level questions.

My question would be: as someone who passed OCA 8, I thought the most important chapters to study would be the following: sub-chapters "Working with Enums", "Sealing Classes", "Encapsulating Data with Records", "Creating Nested Classes" from "Beyond Classes" chapter, whole "Lambdas and Functional Interfaces" chapter (need to study more about lambdas because I'm not that confident in it), the whole "Collections and Generics" chapter, whole "Modules" chapter, whole "Streams" chapter, whole "Concurrency" chapter, whole "I/O" chapter, whole "JDBC" chapter and the following sub-chapters from "Exceptions and Localization": "Automating Resource Management", "Formatting Values", "Supporting Internationalization and Localization", "Loading Properties with Resource Bundles". Would this be enough, if I also have previous OCA 8 knowledge?

Also, was it a good idea to move over to Java 17 and take an exam where 50% of it is stuff I already learned for the previous one?
Is there anything more, or, are there any other important changes on the other "common" topics, from Java 8 to Java 17, which I should know specifically for the exam?

[Kee Zi Yang]

I also recently passed OCA and thinking about OCP 17 ... But I think the likelihood of failing is so much higher than if we were to just take OCP 8, I really like the newer Java features introduced though. Also passing OCA gives you the advantage of taking OCP 8 which I think should be an easier exam than OCP17. I think it makes more sense to go for OCP 8 because we already did OCA. Also if you were to fail OCP 17 by a few marks, you would kick yourself for not taking the easier exam lol.