Tag Archives: oracle

OCP Book Now Available!

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OCP: Oracle Certified Professional Java SE 8 Programmer II Study Guide: Exam 1Z1-809

Jeanne and I are thrilled to announce that the Kindle version of our second book, OCP: Oracle Certified Professional Java SE 8 Programmer II Study Guide: Exam 1Z0-809, is now available for purchase on Amazon! The OCP paperback edition, available for pre-order, is currently printing and will be shipping in the next month.

This book, which is nearly twice the size of our previous OCA Study Guide, is chock full of information on topics ranging from design patterns, to concurrency and NIO.2, to JDBC. Unlike many other older study guides, we have written our material centered entirely around Java 8, with an emphasis on lambda expressions and streams.

While some experienced developers can pass Oracle’s OCA exam with limited amount of studying, the same cannot be said for the OCP exam. Besides the large-scale inclusion of lambda expressions and streams, the exam covers includes much broader topics that seasoned developers may not be readily familiar with.

For example, you might have been using JDBC for years, but can you list the differences between obtaining a connection using the 3.0 and 4.0 versions of the drivers? You may have also been reading and writing files with java.io streams for years, but we bet many of you haven’t ever used the mark(), reset(), or skip() methods. It is for reasons like these that we strongly recommend you study carefully for the exam using our book or an equivalent study guide, avoiding the pitfalls (mentally and financially) of having to pay to take the exam multiple times.

Our book covers all 3 variations of the OCP exam, including a dedicated Appendix for those taking the Java 6 or earlier version of the OCP 8 upgrade exam, as it contains material not found in the other two versions of the exams.

We hope you enjoy reading this book as much as we enjoyed writing it!

finding out when Oracle changes the certification objectives

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As Scott and I noted in the introduction of our book, Oracle tends to fiddle with the duration, number of questions and passing score of their certification exams. They also fiddle with the exam objectives themselves on occasion. And as you might imagine, these aren’t well publicized.

First attempt

I originally thought that I would use the ChangeDetection service to subscribe to receive an email when the relevant certification pages changed. This turned out not to work as the HTML is always the same. Oracle uses AJAX to fill in the data. For example, the objectives page for the OCA 8 is rendered using the XML on this page. My next thought was that I’d use the ChangeDetection site to monitor the XML page. No such luck, they don’t support XML.

Writing something myself

A differences program isn’t hard to write, so I created my own in a public github repository. It stores a copy of the “current” data for each exam it follows and checks for differences. (I have it running as a Jenkins periodic build so it checks for updates once a day.) I considered using Travis CI since it supports Java/Maven. However, Travis doesn’t yet support periodic builds. There is a third party site that can trigger your builds for you, but CodeRanch has a perfectly good Jenkins server. And since one of the goals of this project is to be able to announce certification changes on a timely basis in the forums, it seems reasonable to run it there.

How do you find out if there is a change?

For significant changes, we tend to mention them in the relevant certification forum. For the OCA 8 exam, we will also list objective changes on the book page. You can also look at the text files for each exam on github. The last modified date shows the last change. You can also click on the file to see the history/diffs to see what changed and approximately cool. You could even use the ChangeDetection service on the github pages since they aren’t XML. For example, this page is for the OCA 8.

If there is an exam you’d find useful to be tracked and isn’t already, please add a comment on this blog post.

Technologies used

  1. Maven
  2. Selenium (a tiny bit)
  3. HTML Parser
  4. JUnit/Parameterized test

Announcing the OCA: Oracle Certified Associate Java SE 8 Programmer I Study Guide

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Jeanne and I are pleased to announce the upcoming release of our Oracle Certified Associate Java 8 Study Guide for the Java SE 8 Oracle Programmer I exam! We have been working with Wiley Publishing for the past year to bring this book to light, and are thrilled to announce it is nearing completion. Our goal was create a book that is engaging and fun for new and veteran developers alike. The book covers all of the new features that you are required to know for the OCA 8 exam including: the Local Date/Time API, the Period class, lambda expressions, and more. And of course, it covers the “old” topics as well.

scott-and-jeanne
The book, to be tentatively titled OCA: Oracle Certified Associate Java SE 8 Programmer I Study Guide: Exam 1Z1-808, will be available for purchase later this year on Amazon.com and wherever books are sold.

Oracle has already published a beta version of the Java SE 8 Programmer I exam, with the official version to be available in the coming months.

Please visit our new OCA: Oracle Certified Associate Java SE 8 Programmer I Study Guide page for the latest information about the book. If you have any questions for us, feel free to post in the OCA forum at CodeRanch, which Jeanne and Scott visit frequently.