Jeanne Boyarsky - OCP Oracle Certified Professional Java SE 17 Developer Study Guide

In addition to this book, Scott and Jeanne are authors of seven best-selling Java books:

OCA: Java 8 Programmer I Study Guide (Sybex, 2015)

OCP: Java 8 Programmer II Study Guide (Sybex, 2016)

OCA / OCP Java 8 Programmer Practice Tests (Sybex, 2017)

OCP Java 11 Programmer I Study Guide (Sybex, 2019)

OCP Java 11 Programmer II Study Guide (Sybex, 2020)

OCP Java 11 Developer Complete Study Guide (Sybex, 2020)

OCP Java 11 Practice Tests (Sybex, 2021)

They are currently in the process of writing an OCP Java 17 Developer Practice Tests book due out later this year.

Janeice DelVecchiohas been a professional software developer for 12 years and has had a lifelong love of programming and computers. Editing technical books is a fun task for her because she likes finding and fixing defects of all types. In her day job she uses a very broad range of skills with technologies including cloud computing, process automation, advanced unit testing, and devops. She also volunteers at CodeRanch.com, where she runs the Java class known as the Cattle Drive. She is an expert with the Java programming language. If you ask her which language is the best, she will tell you that languages are tools and to pick the one that fits your use case. The first language she learned was BASIC, and one day she hopes to learn gaming development. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, solving puzzles, playing video games, and raising chickens. She loves eating sushi, drinking craft beer, and petting dogs – her guilty pleasure is 1980s pop music. She lives in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

Elena Feldergot into Java development back when the language lacked even generics, and she is delighted that the language, its tooling, and its community have continued growing and adapting to successfully keep up with the ever-changing world. She proofread one of Jeanne and Scott’s first Java 8 Certification Study Guide chapters for fun and ended up doing it professionally ever since.

This book is for those looking to obtain an Oracle Certified Professional: Java SE 17 Developer or Java Foundations Certified Junior Associate title. This book is also for those looking to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of Java. Not only do we want you to pass your exams, but we also want to help you to improve yourself and become a better professional software developer.

The book provides detailed preparation for the following Oracle certification exams:

1Z0-829 Exam: Java SE 17 Developer The Developer exam covers a wide variety of core topics in Java 17 including classes, interfaces, streams, collections, concurrency, and modules.

1Z0-811 Exam: Java Foundations The Foundations exam is a junior-level certification exam that contains a variety of introductory and basic Java 8 topics.

In this introduction, we start by covering important information about the various exams. We then move on to information about how this book is structured. Finally, we conclude with an assessment test so you can see how much studying lies ahead of you.

At the end of the day, the exam is a list of questions. The more you know about the structure of the exam, the better you are likely to do. For example, knowing how many questions the exam contains allows you to better manage your progress and time remaining. In this section, we discuss the details of the exam, along with some history of previous certification exams.

Java is now over 25 years old, celebrating being “born” in 1995. As with anything 25 years old, there is a good amount of history and variation between different versions of Java. Over the years, the certification exams have changed to cover different topics. The number of exams and names of certifications have also changed.

For Java 17, Oracle has simplified things. Becoming an Oracle Certified Professional now requires passing only one exam, not two, and there are no Java 17 upgrade exams. Regardless of the previous certifications you hold, everyone takes the same, single Java 17 exam to become an Oracle Certified Professional.

This means your only choice is between the Java 17 OCP exam and the Java Foundations exam. Our advice is to only take the Java Foundations exam if your employer has specifically asked you to. While it is an easier exam, it targets a very old version of Java and is not meant for professionals who work with Java every day.

Oracle provides a list of objectives to guide you on what to study for each exam. Each objective defines a list of subobjectives that provide additional details about the objective. Unfortunately, the objectives don't encompass the full amount of material needed to pass the exam.

So how do you know what to study? By reading this study guide, of course! We've spent years studying the certification exams in all of their forms and have carefully cultivated topics, material, and practice questions that we are confident can lead to successfully passing the exam. More recently, we've worked hand-in-hand with Oracle helping to create and refine the objectives and material for the Java 11 and Java 17 exams.

As a starting point, you should review the list of objectives presented in this introduction and mark down the ones that are unfamiliar to you. This list, along with the Assessment Test at the end of this introduction, will give you a rough idea of how much you are going to need to study for the exam.

Table I.1shows the information about the exams at the time of publishing.

TABLE I.1Exam information

Oracle has a tendency to fiddle with the length of the exam and the passing score once it comes out. Oracle also likes to “tweak” the exam objectives over time. It wouldn't be a surprise for Oracle to make minor changes to the exam objectives, the number of questions, or the passing score after this book goes to print.

If there are any changes to the exam after this book is published, we will post them on the book page of our blog:

www.selikoff.net/ocp17

In previous certification exams, the list of exam objectives tended to include specific topics, classes, and APIs that you needed to know for the exam. For example, take a look at an objective for the OCP 8 exam (1Z0-809):

Use BufferedReader, BufferedWriter, File, FileReader, FileWriter, FileInputStream, FileOutputStream, ObjectOutputStream, ObjectInputStream, and PrintWriter in the java.io package.

Now compare it with the equivalent objective for the OCP 17 exam (1Z0-829):

Read and write console and file data using I/O Stream.

Notice the difference? The older version is more detailed and describes specific classes you need to understand. The newer version is a lot vaguer. It also gives the exam writers a lot more freedom to insert a new feature without having to update the list of objectives.

Each exam consists entirely of multiple-choice questions. There are between four and seven possible answers. If a question has more than one answer, the question specifically states exactly how many correct answers there are. This book does not do that. We say Choose all that apply to make the questions harder. This means the questions in this book are generally harder than those on the exam. The idea is to give you more practice so you can spot the correct answer more easily on the real exam.