I took the Java 8 Upgrade OCP BETA exam end of April.
I prepared myself with the excellent Java 8 in action and I made my own prep material starting in January as there was nothing available then.
I did some programming too of course.
I likely missed the mark this time, not to far I think but this was a great experience.
This was my first beta exam and in a very poor location to make it more challenging.
I agree with Mikalai and other people.
Exhausting, long, hard to keep up for 3 hours, most of the questions not fitting the screen, no prep material and especially with no tests to get your brain prepared which is the worse.
It is however a very rewarding experience because creating your own material, you have to study in depth and ask yourself more questions than you would with a commercial book.
As an example I dived in lambda implementations (capturing lambdas), advanced stream topics such as characteristics, spliterators, splits, impact of the operations on the characteristics...
It revealed to be out of scope at the exam but this is good knowledge to have if you have to leave the base API or need to troubleshoot.
I will have a look at Mikalai's material and tests and eventually publish mine.
A few beta/incomplete tests are now available from a few commercial sources but I found them very far from the real exam regarding the complexity.
I also recommend Brian Goetz
State of the Lambda and
State of the Lambda: Libraries Edition as a background read.
So I will do beta exams again but you need a forgiving family around.
Being SCJP5 I was told by Oracle to upgrade to SCJP7 then to SCJP8 (1Z0-810).
I have discovered today a future beta exam
1Z1-813 to upgrade from SCJP6 or earlier to JSCJ8.
This is an option however they write late 2015 for this exam so I may go with my initial plan.
Here is an approximate breakdown of the 126 questions in the beta exam:
Anonymous classes: 10%
Optional<T> 10%
Collection enhancements (computeIf(), forEach(), replaceAll(), merge()…): 15%
Files methods (walk(), find()…): 5%
Functional interfaces, lambdas (may include capturing questions?): 10%
Streams: 40% (75% sequential, 25% parallel)
Date/Time API including daylight saving time changes: 5%
JavaScript on Java with Nashorn (Java to/from JS): 5%
Advanced stream questions (Spliterator, ordered streams, exception in a stream, Stream and Collector characteristics…): None!!!
Questions with code sample (they never fit the screen!!!) vs theoretical: 90-95% to 5-10%
Questions with an “exhibit” button to see the code in a window: 0%
Multiple choices (2 or 3) vs single choice: 20% to 80%
Write your own code: 0%
Drag and drop code blocks questions: 0%
Poorly written questions (would not even compile…): 0%
Many questions have a few ellipsis lines (getters and setters go here…)
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