OCP Book Now Available!

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!

when did we write the OCA SE 8 book

Did you write the second book before or after your exam of OCA SE 8.

I got this question from a reader of our OCA book and thought it would make a nice blog post describing the timeline.

In February 2014, Wiley/Sybex approached me about writing this book. Scott and I had discussed writing a book together “one day” so immediately asked him to co-author. Even though the publisher approached me, I still had to write a proposal which was accepted in March 2014. We then signed the contract.

We wrote a draft of all the chapters over the following months. At this point, the OCA 8 objectives hadn’t been announced. Scott held the SCJP 6 certification and I held the OCA/OCP 7 certifications. We used the OCA 7 objectives plus our expectations about changes to the language as a guide for those drafts.

Then the objectives came out. We had some rework and additions at that point. I was surprised basic lambdas were covered on the exam and Java 8 dates were also new. Then in October, I took the beta exam. At this point, the book was already written.

There was an unclear exam objective. After taking the beta exam, I learned what this meant. Which was a minor addition to the book. Other than that, it was written before the exam. Some editing was done after the exam; just in terms of timeline.

Then in December 2014, the e-book came out and it printed in February 2015.

For our upcoming OCP book, more of the book is being written after the beta exam. Just in terms of timeline, we didn’t have as much of a head start.

got to touch my book!

I got to hold a printed copy of our OCA Java 8 Programmer I Study Guide book today!

jeanne-oca

I haven’t gotten my copies from the publisher yet. However, I did get to borrow a copy from Elena who bought it on Amazon. Borrowing your own book feels weird. It was awesome to get to show it to people today though! Yay!

I also learned that the stray character in the assessment exam is not a problem in the print edition.