Passed 1Z0-819 and implemented a Java OCP trainer desktop application

Hi all,

I'm new to coderanch despite I read many topics in the past, especially when I started my studies for the OCP 1Z0-819 exam certification.

Overall it took exactly 3 months for me to prepare my studies.
I started with the awesome OCP guide written by Jeanne Boyasky and Scott Selikoff, both the guide book and the exercises book have proven very helpful. It tooks 2 months of full immersion studies to complete both. At least for a senior java programmer, I believe that a junior programmer could take 3 or 4 month minimum.
I had hard times trying to memorize some parts of java like all the functional interfaces, the whole table of operators precedence, all the deque methods. So I decided to code a small project to help myself to memorize these concepts, I'll share it here in case anyone wants to contribute or suggest improvements:
https://github.com/thermz/OCPTrainer

After the 3 exam simulations of the OCP exercises book, my results weren't that good (74, 70, 72). I probably would have passed the real exam, but I wasn't completely confident so I also decided to pay my 10 bucks for Entuware mocks.
I cleared the 3 foundation exams with an excellent performance (76, 84, 89), but then at my first Enthuware mock I failed pretty hard with a terrible 58 (I got overtime and I had not enough time to review the long questions marked).
Then it got better from time to time, and after 12 mocks I decided to move to the real exam.

The level of the questions was actually similar to the Enthuware mocks but there were a couple of very easy questions, for instance "which is the module included in every java application?" was a trivial question indeed .
Many questions require reasoning and a clear mind so the suggestion of having a good rest before the exam is absolutely true.

I passed the exam with 85% score, overall I think it's a good score. Both the guide and Enthuware mocks helped me a lot.

I'm available for any clarification about my certification experience and my desktop app.

Hi Riccardo!

Welcome to Code Ranch and congratulations!

I am going to try your project, but what I noticed so far -- you should not commit the target directory from your project to the remote repo, as it contains binaries, which big, hard to track by GitHub and in general not required there.

Good luck!
MZ

Dear Mikalai, thank you for your feedback.
I usually do not version the target directory and I basically gitignore it.
In this case as you can see I just gitignored the .class files because they are useless to index.

You are right about the idea of not versioning binaries, however in this case the project is very light, the compiled jar is only 0.7 MB and for now I don't expect it will grow much bigger.

Also I wanted an easy way to provide the compiled jar file related to the last version, so you don't have to recompile the project on your PC to run it. Since this is not a library but a final application, not something you want to include as a dependency somewhere, I excluded the idea of uploading it to maven central.

Of course if you can suggest a better solution to achieve the same result of providing the jar to download, which at the moment is "hyperlinked" in the README.MD, I'll be very glad to hear it.

Thanks again for your feedback.

Riccardo

Mikalai Zaikin wrote:Hi Riccardo!

Welcome to Code Ranch and congratulations!

I am going to try your project, but what I noticed so far -- you should not commit the target directory from your project to the remote repo, as it contains binaries, which big, hard to track by GitHub and in general not required there.

Good luck!
MZ

congratulations !