Hi all,
Gladly I can say that I passed the OCA exam yesterday with a score of 66%. I was aiming for the +70% but I'm still glad that I passed.
With no mathematical or IT background I started end of 2019 with the OCA Study Guide from Jeanne Boyarski and Scott Selikoff. Before that I started with Study Guide from Edward Finegan and Robert Ligouri but that was in my opinion to advanced for me to start with and switched to Sybex which is more reader-friendly for starters. I do have to say that I have some experience with PHP at an amateurlevel so I was already a little bit familiar with some basic develop structures from a hobby perspective.
Several years ago I just started from scratch with coding of PHP and created simple dynamic websites and never took the time to learn the fundamentals first. That's why I wanted to start to learn the basics first before start actually coding with Java.
I have to say in the beginning it was a steep learning path to grasp the Java language and I had many frustrating moments.
But somehow I got infected with Java and (still) really want to learn it. At some frustrating moments I took long walks with the dog (and of course my wife) and that really helped to try it afterwards again. Sometimes during the walks it cleared my mind and realized what I was doing wrong. (this all is beside a non-IT fulltime job in my free time)
Anyway I practiced a lot with the code snippets in the book and experimenting different scenario’s with that in command prompt as well with IDE.
I also watched all together several hours of tutorials from Durga on YouTube. Once you are a little bit used with his accent it are really great tutorials. i.e. 10 hours of exceptions really explains it very well for beginners.
All the additional stuff I learned I wrote down in the OCA Study Guide and added to the objective. So I used a lot of yellow markers and filled the empty spaces with my own additional text.
After 2 years of reading and practicing (at a normal pace) I finally purchased a Enthuware licence last September. That helped a lot to get used to the exam questions style and learned stuff like i.e. that toUpperCase returns a new String when there is really something converted and that is crucial to know when you are comparing Strings. (docs.oracle.com says: Returns:the String, converted to uppercase. Do they mean the String or a new String?)
About the first 20 questions of the exam where long pieces of code to read and to find out what was the problem or provided solutions. During my Enthuware practice I decided to mark and skip question when it was taking longer about 2 minutes. After 20 questions there where more questions that was easier to answer in the 2 minute time. So there is really a psychological aspect to put you under timepressure in the exam.
In my case there where a lot of questions about arrays and complex nested for loops (and combinations of that) and beside that about inheritance and extending classes questions and casting objects, overriding,overloading methods and constructors calls and variable scope where mostly the objectives I encountered in the questions that is timeconsuming. I think reading this kind of questions has to be a second nature and would advise to practise on that a lot to do it quick.
I really want to thank Jeanne Boyarski and Scott Selikoff for the great study book they wrote, for me it's almost some kind of a bible.
Finally I need some advise, with what or how, I can continue to learn the Java language. Because I think I don't have enough practical skills enough to start with OCP book (1Z0819) I want to improve the coding skills first. Some told me to create Java some applications to learn to code, but what kind of applications? Do you have suggestions?
Yes, I think I want to continue with OCP Java 11 Complete Study Guide and not with OCP Java 8 because I read that it could retire soon. Right? I really appreciate your advice in general to continue to learn Java.
Thanks in advance.