Zend Certified Engineer

Today I took the Zend PHP 5 cer­ti­fi­ca­tion exam, and passed! As of writ­ing this post, I am not in the Zend Yel­low Pages yet, so if you click the icon it will make me look like a liar, but trust me, I passed. I’m in the Zend Yel­low Pages, and you can click the ZCE PHP 5 icon to view my entry.

The exam is sim­i­lar in for­mat to the Zend prac­tice tests (70 ques­tions in 90 min­utes, with mul­ti­ple choice and fill in the blank answers), but the top­ics and con­tent appeared to be fairly dif­fer­ent. I’m not allowed to share the test with you, but I think it is alright to make some vague ref­er­ences to the type of ques­tions I was asked, as Zend them­selves share this infor­ma­tion freely on their website.

Many of the ques­tions were crazy easy, sort of in a “if you’ve ever used PHP then you should know this” cat­e­gory. For exam­ple, the basics of how loops work. Some took a lit­tle more knowl­edge, but should still be fairly easy to some­one that has been pro­gram­ming in PHP for a few years.

Some were ridicu­lous and shouldn’t (in my opin­ion) have been on the test. For exam­ple, one ques­tion ref­er­enced the func­tion str­spn. In the PHP world, the usefulness/popularity of a func­tion can gen­er­ally be deter­mined by the num­ber of com­ments it has in the online doc­u­men­ta­tion. This func­tion has a whop­ping three: two explain­ing what the func­tion actu­ally does because the offi­cial descrip­tion is con­fus­ing, and one try­ing to help peo­ple under­stand why they’d even want to use this function.

One thing I thought was inter­est­ing is that the test is prob­a­bly eas­ier for peo­ple who have spent a lot of time dig­ging in other people’s code. For exam­ple, there may be 5 com­mon ways of get­ting a task done. Some ways may be faster, or eas­ier to read, or use a sin­gle func­tion call, or what­ever. If you haven’t had to spend time in other people’s code, then you may never have seen all 5 ways of get­ting the task done because you always do it 1 way. The exam expects you to not only be able to under­stand how the other 4 ways work if you hap­pen across them, but ide­ally you know what they are before you go to the test­ing center.

If you’re an estab­lished PHP pro­gram­mer and want to take the exam, I’d rec­om­mend tak­ing the prac­tice tests, deter­mine what areas you are rusty in (for me it was PDO and XML) and study up a bit.

I have this post cat­e­go­rized in Goals because it has been a goal of mine to get this cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, Invest­ing because it is an invest­ment in myself, and Web Dev because, well, PHP is web dev to me.