your Feedback on Oracle University and Simon Roberts' O'Reilly Course for OCP Java SE 17/21 Exam Pre

I hope you're doing well. I am currently preparing to take the OCP Java SE 17 or Java SE 21 exam and have a subscription to Oracle University. Additionally, I have access to Simon Roberts' course on O'Reilly. I would appreciate hearing from those who have followed either or both of these courses. How did you find them in terms of covering all the necessary aspects of the OCP exam? How well do they explain the concepts and align with the exam topics? I would love to hear your experiences and thoughts on how each course compares in helping with exam preparation. Thank you in advance for your insights!

Greetings Yamal, I hope your day is going well. Thanks for asking about my course--obviously I'm biased -- that said, I'll try to offer something helpful.

I created the very first of these exams when it was all under the control of Sun Microsystems, and worked on many of the updates through Java 8 with Sun, and later as a contractor. More recently, however, Oracle seems to avoid involving any outside input, so it's harder for me to know what's in their minds, or to be sure of everything that's in their question pool.

One of the things that troubles me a bit about the current versions of the exams is that the objectives seem rather vague, which makes it hard to know exactly what might turn up on the exam and what will definitely not. To address this, I make sure to take these exams at least twice, so I get a better feel for the spread of topics. I also pay attention to things folks say about the questions they've seen. I asked one of the Oracle folks about the vague objectives, and their position was that it "makes folks learn more fully". (I think psychometricians and pedgagogists would think that a bit improper, but there it is).

Anyway, based on what I've seen of the question pool, I tried to keep my course focused on things you actually need to know, with a small "overspill" into things that a) are in scope of the very broad objectives and b) if I were an employer I might like to believe job-candidates actually had some understand of. I also try to spend a little extra time explaining the topic areas that folks seem to have difficulties with, or for which the questions asked seemed to be particularly tricky.

I did run through an older Oracle course--if I recall correctly it was the one for the Java 11 exam--and it seemed to address lots of detail that does not seem to show up on the exam. It also seemed more like an enumeration of facts, with less emphasis on explaining and supporting a learner's understanding. Of course, if you are certain of 99% of the material anyway, just running through a refresher might be more efficient than my approach.

So, I guess both courses have their place and address somewhat different audiences.

If you'd like to ask more, please feel free--I think I'm now subscribed to this particular topic, so I would expect to be notified if you do reply. I hope the above is at least somewhat helpful!

Good luck with the exam when you take it!
Cheers,
Simon