Hi everyone!
Yesterday I passed my exam, so now I will explain a bit about my experience and maybe it will help someone, like all the other posts in this forum helped me.
I had been using
Java for years before taking this exam, but I realized during my studying process that there were many things I didn't understand completely.
The exam goes for specific knowledge, and that needs to be prepared.
1) Udemy course
I started preparing three months ago but giving it just between two or three hours per day. I used an online Udemy course to go over the topics that are covered in the exam.
This is the course (in spanish, my native language): https://www.udemy.com/course/curso-programador-java-certificado-i/
This I think is a similar one in english: https://www.udemy.com/course/oracle-java-associate-certification-exam-course-1z0-808/
I didn't read any book since I feel more comfortable by following video tutorials, but I guess that it's just about personal preference.
When I was finished with the course, I went over every topic and coded a small example for almost everything, just to verify my knowledge.
2) Enthuware
After I was done with the course and my little code examples, I followed the recommendations from other people in this forum and I bought the Enthuware mock tests.
In my opinion, they are priceless. The detailed explanation for every single question, combined with the enthuware forum, makes it a great experience.
This were my
Enthuware results. I always disabled the checkbox that allows you to know how many right answers there are. That forced me to analyze every single possibility, not being able to choose by elimination.
Foundation
test - 42%
Test 1 - 54%
Test 2 - 47%
Test 3 - 70%
Test 4 - 71%
Test 5 - 70%
Test 6 - 74 %
Test 7 - 82%
Last Day Test - 80%
As you can see in the start my knowledge was not complete, but by reviewing everything in detail, I managed to improve a lot after doing the first three tests.
It was a long process in the start, but after giving it some time to understand the explanations, everything started to make sense. After that, the following tests I got much better results and my confidence increased.
I spent around a month with the Enthuware mock exams and I think that it was the most crucial part of my preparation.
When I was doing the certification exam many questions felt familiar and in my opinion, they were a bit easier than the Enthuware questions. But again, that's just my own perception of it.
The first 10 minutes of the exam I was deadly nervous, but managed to relax after solving a few easy questions. I had 20 minutes left when I was finished with the exam but I still used them to review some questions that were a bit tricky.
I hope this was somehow useful and if you are thinking about taking the exam, good luck!