June 3, 2009 at 11:36How to become a Zend PHP 5 Certified Engineer
It happened, cheers! Now I have the honorary status of ZCE :)
Therefore, I would like to share my experience in preparing for certification, and at the same time conduct a small educational program on the topic of certification in PHP.
Certification is carried out by Zend , this company was at the forefront of developing the core of PHP, and still continues to actively promote and support new technologies in this area.
With the growing popularity of PHP, there was such a problem - there are many developers, but which of them are really pros? It is not so easy to disassemble, so it was decided to create an industrial certification standard.
For such a difficult task, the leaders of the PHP developer community were gathered, and they, in turn, nabolbasili the first version of the test for PHP4, a little later it was replaced by a test for PHP5. Which I actually handed over.
There is a small remark. In the West, in particular in the states, a certified specialist is valued much more than not certified, but in Russia, the presence of a piece of paper confirming your status is rather a plus, but not a prerequisite.
The question arises, why then do I need certification?
For me personally, it was a challenge, a test, the challenge of which I decided to arrange for myself. It became interesting whether I can pass or not, and indeed - to evaluate my level of knowledge / experience / skills is useful. Well, the status of ZCE will not be superfluous either :-)
It is said - done. Registered on the site, acquired Certification Bundle in the same place., it's something like an all-in-one kit, costs $ 165 includes the right to certification, 10 trial tests and the Certification Guide . On the PEARSON VUE website, I chose my regional testing center and set the date and time for the exam. PEARSON VUE has regional testing centers in almost every more or less large city, so there should not be a problem with this.
Now for more on the test format. Trial tests (as well as certification itself) in English. 70 questions, everything about everything is given 90 minutes. It seems that little, but in fact this is enough. A lot of questions frankly say “with a sub-emphasis”, where the comma will be skipped and where the bracket is, so you need to be very careful. I especially remembered the questions on knowledge of functions, all the basic (and quite a lot of exotic) functions for working with strings, arrays need to know, without this in any way. And of course, to understand the difference between print () and echo () :-)
For a while you will have to grow to the manual.
For example, what will this script output? Naturally it is necessary to "rummage" in databases, SQL. Understanding the intricacies of using the new PHP5 features in this area is simply the must
. At the exam, a question about PDO, MySQLi, SQLite, transactions, prepared statements may come across in an easy way, it should be like “our father” ,-)
Questions can be either “open” or “closed”. You must answer “Open” in a special input field. There are usually 4 possible answers to the “Closed” ones, of which you must select the indicated number of true ones.
Such a pressing topic as parsing XML documents was also not spared (SimpleXML, DOM, SAX). As for SOAP, REST, XML-RPC, at least you need to know how one differs from the other, practice is desirable.
Particularly “pleased” with the abundance of questions on the topic of streams and network programming, before I somehow circumvented this section, now I had to pull it up.
Do you know how XSS differs from CSRF? Well, if not, then you are welcome to read special literature :-) This will be for certification. You must be prepared to explain all the nuances of using the htmlentities , htmlspecialchars and strip_tags functions , etc. etc. In short, security is not the last place.
Of course, knowledge of OOP and design patterns in the exam is useful, because in PHP5 they significantly improved the work with objects.
Naturally, even if a person has been working with PHP for a long time, he may not be aware of many of its capabilities. Therefore, reading literature is necessary, alas, all the best in English.
I will try to throw the necessary list of books and resources:
In general, you need to know a lot, preferably deeply. Time to remember the saying: “It’s hard to learn, easy to fight.” :-)
It seems to have considered everything. It remains to add that PHP certification is a great chance to improve and tidy up your knowledge, so go ahead! Everyone gets what to strive for.
UPD:
From the moment of publication, I received a lot of questions on the habrojashchik, the answers to them deserve a separate article)
Therefore, read on at brainreactor.ru . A series of articles on PHP certification is planned.
Therefore, I would like to share my experience in preparing for certification, and at the same time conduct a small educational program on the topic of certification in PHP.
Certification is carried out by Zend , this company was at the forefront of developing the core of PHP, and still continues to actively promote and support new technologies in this area.
With the growing popularity of PHP, there was such a problem - there are many developers, but which of them are really pros? It is not so easy to disassemble, so it was decided to create an industrial certification standard.
For such a difficult task, the leaders of the PHP developer community were gathered, and they, in turn, nabolbasili the first version of the test for PHP4, a little later it was replaced by a test for PHP5. Which I actually handed over.
There is a small remark. In the West, in particular in the states, a certified specialist is valued much more than not certified, but in Russia, the presence of a piece of paper confirming your status is rather a plus, but not a prerequisite.
The question arises, why then do I need certification?
For me personally, it was a challenge, a test, the challenge of which I decided to arrange for myself. It became interesting whether I can pass or not, and indeed - to evaluate my level of knowledge / experience / skills is useful. Well, the status of ZCE will not be superfluous either :-)
It is said - done. Registered on the site, acquired Certification Bundle in the same place., it's something like an all-in-one kit, costs $ 165 includes the right to certification, 10 trial tests and the Certification Guide . On the PEARSON VUE website, I chose my regional testing center and set the date and time for the exam. PEARSON VUE has regional testing centers in almost every more or less large city, so there should not be a problem with this.
Now for more on the test format. Trial tests (as well as certification itself) in English. 70 questions, everything about everything is given 90 minutes. It seems that little, but in fact this is enough. A lot of questions frankly say “with a sub-emphasis”, where the comma will be skipped and where the bracket is, so you need to be very careful. I especially remembered the questions on knowledge of functions, all the basic (and quite a lot of exotic) functions for working with strings, arrays need to know, without this in any way. And of course, to understand the difference between print () and echo () :-)
For a while you will have to grow to the manual.
For example, what will this script output? Naturally it is necessary to "rummage" in databases, SQL. Understanding the intricacies of using the new PHP5 features in this area is simply the must
echo '3' + '0.5' , print('2') + 1;
?>
. At the exam, a question about PDO, MySQLi, SQLite, transactions, prepared statements may come across in an easy way, it should be like “our father” ,-)
Questions can be either “open” or “closed”. You must answer “Open” in a special input field. There are usually 4 possible answers to the “Closed” ones, of which you must select the indicated number of true ones.
Such a pressing topic as parsing XML documents was also not spared (SimpleXML, DOM, SAX). As for SOAP, REST, XML-RPC, at least you need to know how one differs from the other, practice is desirable.
Particularly “pleased” with the abundance of questions on the topic of streams and network programming, before I somehow circumvented this section, now I had to pull it up.
Do you know how XSS differs from CSRF? Well, if not, then you are welcome to read special literature :-) This will be for certification. You must be prepared to explain all the nuances of using the htmlentities , htmlspecialchars and strip_tags functions , etc. etc. In short, security is not the last place.
Of course, knowledge of OOP and design patterns in the exam is useful, because in PHP5 they significantly improved the work with objects.
Naturally, even if a person has been working with PHP for a long time, he may not be aware of many of its capabilities. Therefore, reading literature is necessary, alas, all the best in English.
I will try to throw the necessary list of books and resources:
- PHP Architects's Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide 2nd edition.
- The Zend PHP Certification Practice Test Book
- PHPArchitect's Guide to PHP Design Patterns
- Pro PHP XML and Web Services by Robert Richards
- PHP and MySQL Web Development. Fourth Edition.
In general, you need to know a lot, preferably deeply. Time to remember the saying: “It’s hard to learn, easy to fight.” :-)
It seems to have considered everything. It remains to add that PHP certification is a great chance to improve and tidy up your knowledge, so go ahead! Everyone gets what to strive for.
UPD:
From the moment of publication, I received a lot of questions on the habrojashchik, the answers to them deserve a separate article)
Therefore, read on at brainreactor.ru . A series of articles on PHP certification is planned.