Category Archives: Java Certification

Announcing: Our NEW Java OCA / OCP 8 Practice Test Book!

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pt-cover

Jeanne and I are thrilled and excited to announce that we are nearly done writing a brand new book for the OCA / OCP Java 8 Programmer exams!

The new book, OCA / OCP Java SE 8 Programmer Practice Tests, includes over 1000+ hand-crafted and peer reviewed questions. We’ve also created a new permanent Practice Tests OCA / OCP 8 book page on the blog to keep track of updates and news about the new book.

Jeanne and I wanted to say how thankful we are to our all of our readers of our first two books. Without your invaluable feedback and positive reviews, we never would have been offered this opportunity to expand our OCA and OCP subject matter. We promise to make this next book our best yet!

We are expecting to ship the book in March 2017. Stay tuned for additional news about the book!

OCA 8 Book: Online Material and Practice Exams now available

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If you’re one of the individuals who already purchased the e-book of our OCA 8 Study Guide, you might have noticed the online materials weren’t up yet. They went up today.

If you’ve ordered a printed book, we are getting close. Amazon.com is currently predicting delivery between January 27th and February 25th. We will post again on this blog as soon as we hear of an actual US delivery. First printed book delivery was reported on January 31st.

We are also doing a book promotion at CodeRanch next week. Ask us a question and be entered to win a copy of the book.

sybex

What do the online materials include?

  1. 3 mock/practice exams (60 questions each)
  2. 2 sets of flashcards
  3. A searchable glossary
  4. Electronic versions of the assessment test and end of chapter review questions from the book

How do I register for access?

Step 1 – buy the book. Once you have an electronic copy or printed copy of the book in hand, it is easy. When going to the Sybex test bank site, you are asked to supply/create an access code. Creating one is easy. You are asked for your name and email. You are also asked to answer a question that is easy if you have the book. (Like “what is the answer to question 3 in chapter 2” or “fill in the blank from the text of figure 2.4”). Then the access code is emailed to you. It came immediately when I tested it.

With the access code, you go back to the test bank site and create an account. You get to use your email as username and the password of your choice making it easy to remember. Then you are in!

How is the test engine?

This is a new test engine from Wiley. Older books came with a CD that had a Flash based system for questions. While I’m sure this is very nice for non-coding exams, the old engine only showed a handful of lines of code on screen which was bad for programming exams. I’m SO glad they improved this before our book came out.

The new test engine is beautiful. It shows roughly as much code as the real exam. It has a timer so you know how long you have taken. (It counts up instead of down like the real exam does, but you know how long the real exam gives you so this is fine. It’s actually a good thing since Oracle likes to change the length of time allowed for the exam.) The engine lets you bookmark questions for review; as does the real exam. The whole system is intuitive and nice to use.

Author advice

  1. The engine lets you choose how many questions you want in the practice exam. I recommend taking them with the 60 questions each that are indented. A lot of thought went into which questions appear together on a practice exam and you’ll get the most realistic experience.
  2. The flashcards allow you to choose sequential or random order. I recommend random order. Just like you’d shuffle your physical flashcards to make sure you remember best.

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