Martijn's PHP Coding Blog

taipei 101 by orange tuesday @ flickr

I have been busy these last couple of weeks preparing for the Zend Certified Engineer / PHP5 exam. Although I have been using PHP for years – I never had a need to “prove” this. That might change in a few months as I start looking for a new job. Doing the Zend exam in preparation of this sounded like a good start. My first step was to order the Zend PHP5 Certification Study Guide by Davey Shafik and Ben Ramsey from Amazon.

The difficulty is not so much in the technologies — most things in PHP are very straightforward — but the sheer scope of what PHP covers and the potential for in dept questions. The exam covers programming basics such as converting hex / octal and decimal, XML & XPath, Web programming, OOP, Databases, Pattern theory etc. The study guide covers most topics but it alone is not enough to pass the exam. It will set you on the right path — but you really need to dive deeper.

After reading the book once or twice, doing the PHP | Architect Vulcan mockup exam (which costs just a few US$ per try) is really a required next step. If after reading the book you are still happy in theory land — the mock exams quickly bring you back to the nitty gritty of PHP programming. Yes, its all trick questions about code, php.ini settings, code examples (was that &$var or $var?), cross site scripting and otherwise suspiciously real fake code.

I booked the exam for this morning and the nearest Vue Pearsons exam was at the Chunghua Telecom Corporate University (which is the training centre for Taiwans state run telecom) in Taipei.

This is the district that as a foreigner in Taiwan you visit every few years to extend your resident visa. Past the old visa office, the firebrigade and police station is a big Chunghua compound. The guards were a bit surprised to see me but a little Chinese goes a long way.

No long queues of people taking exams — the exam room was unlocked for me and I had a cup of coffee while two friendly admin ladies/supervisors setup the exam. All the forms are in Chinese — but they managed to dig up an English version from somewhere.

The exam is very much like the mock exam — having done the mock exam twice I didn’t feel pressured by the ticking clock.

The VuePearson software is a bit slow, and not free of bugs. (Two exam questions were unreadable dumps of what looks like RTF so I had to skip them). I noted both questions to the supervisors. Expect many trick questions — and some very detailed questions about basically anything covered by PHP.

With plenty of time left I reviewed all questions one more time — and probably increased the number of mistakes — and then pressed the big “end of exam” button.

Result? Of course it was a pass — the paper I received at the end tells me this — if I failed I would be back at square one.

The only question I had as I left the exam centre was : what kind of grades are there? The mock exam has fail/pass and excellent. The real exam only pass/fail.

The VuePearson website lists my results as “processing” .. so I will check back later to confirm that I have been added to the list of Zend exam survivors as #12562.

Next up in my list of things to do are the MySQL Developer exams 1 & 2… After that I might give the Zend Framework exam a try.

Tags: exam, PHP, zend

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 2:29 pm and is filed under PHP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.