SCJP 1.6 Exam (Changes from 1.5)

Question

I'm doing my SCJP 1.6 exam in a couple of days. Unfortunately, I only had the Java 1.5 study guide to work with.

What are the changes between the 1.5 and 1.6 exam?

Answer 1

Did you look at Sun's site describing the exam? The exam objectives section tells you what you need to know for the exam. I'd recommend reading through it and searching the internet for anything that's not already in the 1.5 study guide.

Answer 2

@Josh Brown Yeah, I did.

It's just the Navigable stuff and the Console I think; I'm a little surprised there's a new exam for so little material, which is partly why I asked the question.

Answer 3

The Java Ranch forum explains that the main difference is the addition of 3 classes/interfaces: Console, NavigableSet and NavigableMap.

NavigableSet is implemented by TreeSet and ConcurrentSkipListSet. NavigableMap is implemented by TreeMap and ConcurrentSkipListMap. I don't think SkipLists are in the syllabus, so the important thing to learn is the extensions to the TreeMap and TreeList classes. These are largely focussed on methods that return subsets of the collection which are backed by the original collection. This means that changes to either collection can affect the other collection.

The Console questions are about getting input from the user, usually from the terminal. Note:

• System.console() will return null if there isn't an available terminal
• The readLine() methods return a String
• The readPassword() methods return a char[]
• Several methods take printf/format style arguments that can be used to provided a formatted prompt

I'm not sure why there is so little extra material. Possibly Sun felt a lot of stuff in 1.6 wasn't core Java or were just too big, e.g. the XML and Scripting APIs.

Answer 4

I think the reason there's a new exam is due to the fact that they always want people to use the latest version of the JDK, even (as in the Java 6 case) there are few changes. Java 7 looks like its going to be the next big jump if the blogosphere is to be believed.