Oracle Certified JAVA programmer exam preparation

Quite by chance I noticed that a guide appeared on dzone for a relatively new exam from Oracle and also decided to write.

I have to say that silver bullet golden hammer for passing this exam will not be here. Among Java developers, there is a common craving for best practices. Since many problems have already been solved once and by someone during the course of almost 20 years of language development, among programmers it is considered to be a bad tone to invent your own bike. This Java guru thinks in paradigms from the books of Josh Bloch and Bruce Eckel . Me, who came from other languages, it always touched. In this case, you will have to work a lot, because there is no perfect source for preparation yet.

I passed the exam the second time, so maybe for someone my approach to training will seem too harsh. But this is how we got in Russia. When I came to donate for the first time about the new features of Java 7, I only knew from books. The reason for this was that at that time the 6th version of the JVM was used in all my projects. On the home computer, I could not put an implementation from Oracle. no applet normally started with it! With the transition to Mountain Lion and the release of new bug fixes, I can say that the 7th java-machine under the poppy works no worse than on Linux. Maybe a little slower, but in general the same.

Why am I all this? Besides that the lion's share of questions in the exam is just on features of the 7th version of java. To be precise, special attention should be paid to:

• try-with-resources
• precise rethrow
• diamond syntax
• binary literals
• switch for strings
• Jdbc
• NIO.2
• Singleton, DAO and Factory patterns

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The exam does not require thorough knowledge of all APIs, focusing on the so-called. corner cases. That is, places that are not described in books, and their understanding comes only after practicing with a particular class. Here is my list that really helped prepare for the surrender and step over the threshold of 80 points:

• A lot, rather even a LOT of thoughtfully written code. At work, I come across mostly Java web components, and in order to understand many of the things I did not use (like NIO.2, for example), I helped my own projects in which I managed to use them. Unlike all past Sun certifications, this exam cannot be memorized, you really need a lot of coding!
• A good book, A comprehensive OCPJP 7 guide . Unfortunately, there are a lot of typos and inaccuracies, especially in terms of mock tests.
• Mock exams by Enthuware ($ 10). In the new edition they were radically changed, but still I can not recommend them as the only source of preparation.
• Pro Java 7 NIO.2 by Apress
• The already classic book K & B SCJP 6 study guide , there is a wonderful chapter on IO

It really helped me a lot when taking the exam: knowledge of the Collections API, ability to use try-with-resources, knowledge of regular expressions, experience with NIO.2, and experience in creating multi-threaded applications.

Good luck!

OCAJP Exam Preparation Description