Category Archives: OCA Book

using our OCA 8 book to study for the OCA 7?

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As of now, Oracle isn’t allowing developers to take the OCA 8 + OCP 7 to get OCPJP 8 certified. This means that some readers who have already bought our OCA 8 book might want to take the OCA 7. (In particular, those who need to get OCPJP certified by September or so and don’t want to take the beta exam.) Those new to Java/certs and just starting out now aren’t likely to find this constraining and can take the OCA 8.

Timeline

I’m predicting the OCP 8 exam will be released in September because:

  • The beta is launching April 25th.
  • I’m guessing they will give two months taking us to June.
  • Then Oracle needs 10 weeks to prepare the real exam taking us to September.

The beta is good because is is $50. It is bad because it is longer and you don’t get your score for months.

How do I “backport” the book for the OCA 7 exam

This matrix compares the OCA 7 and OCA 8 exams. This means you can read the OCA 8 book to study for the OCA 7 exam with the following changes:

  1. Skip the section on dates/times in Chapter 3.
  2. Skip the section on lambdas/predicates in Chapter 4.
  3. Skip the parts about static/default methods in interfaces in Chapter 5.

You’ll slightly overstudy this way. For example, OCA 7 doesn’t ask you to describe encapsulation. But not by any significant amount.

What JDK should I use?

Remember to either use a Java 7 JDK or compile with the -source 1.7 flag. For example:

javac -source 1.7 Jeanne.java

This will ensure you aren’t accidentally relying on a Java 8 feature. For example, the final keyword works a bit differently in Java 8. Not in a way that affects the OCA exam scope. But you could get confused if compiling with a different version

 

jeanne and scott’s first book – with picture

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The book has either been out for three months or six weeks depending on how you count. (The e-book was released earlier). A couple weeks ago, Scott and I took a picture with the book:

scott-book

 

We’ve also learned that Amazon has a page called authorcentral.amazon.com which shows you “real time” book stats:

stats

 

Well real time with three disclaimers:

  1. It’s updated weekly.
  2. It only includes US sales.
  3. It only includes printed book sales.

While it is bizarre to me that Amazon doesn’t include Kindle sales, it is cool seeing the map. The NY area has the most sales which isn’t surprising. Scott and I both live in the tri-state area and have therefore told the most people there. DC and Dallas were second and third.

Scott and I currently have the #1 Oracle cert book on Amazon

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Scott and I currently have the #1 Oracle cert book on Amazon and the #20 Java book overall from our OCA 8 book. Granted this is misleading since it is a “book just came out” sales bump. But still really cool. It’s also cool to see questions like this one where you can see the reader understands or has a question about a subtle detail.

oca-1

And thank you to everyone who has been sending us Errata.We are keeping a list on our OCA 8 book page. So far they are minor (typo things that don’t affect content.) Still, it’s good to have a list. That way we can fix them if there is a second printing or we write a Java 9 cert book! Plus if you are puzzled about whether it something is a typo, it is likely someone else reported it!

 

 

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