First of all I want to say that I am an economist and I had had two years experiences of working with java when I started preparing for the certification exam. Everything began after buying “OCA: Oracle Certified Associate Java SE 8 Programmer I Study Guide: Exam 1Z0-808” by Jeanne Boyarsky & Scott Selikoff (later it will be mentioned as SYBEX). My English level was not good enough and first days I managed to read only 1 page per hour by using dictionary. I spent 7-8 hours to study and was able to finish reading only ~8-10 pages in a day. I wrote all code examples written in the book again in IDE/notepad in order to learn topics well.
Firstly, I read “Introduction”, then “Appendix B”. Then I took “Assessment Test” before starting Chapter 1. I could answer 3-4 questions hardly, and didn’t know others. Everything was difficult for me when I was a newbie. I was afraid that I would not be able to pass the exam. Sometimes I gave up, wanted to stop studying and thought that I did not have a potential to pass the exam. However, it was my goal to get the certificate and I had promised myself that I would do it. Despite the fact that my fears, uncertainty continued for a month, gradually I started to believe in myself.
After reading all chapters once my results of review questions were as follows (without time limit):
I spent a lot of time on answering questions. I couldn’t get used to code format of questions. At the exam I would have ~2 minutes for each question and because of that I had to learn how to manage my time effectively. After reading the recommendation shown in the link I started using Notepad instead of IDE (applied it from chapter 4). I found this technique very helpful. First days it was very hard to me but then I enjoyed it. Finally, I could keep in mind that length belongs to array and length() to String. It was very helpful for me to use notepad and javac/java.
