PHP 5 Certification

I recently decided to pursue a PHP 5 Certification. I purchased the Zend PHP 5 Certification Bundle, which includes the study guide (hardcopy and downloadable PDF), 10 online practice exams, and an exam voucher. I just finished reading over the 250 page study guide. It covers a variety of PHP concepts:

• PHP Basics
• Functions
• Arrays
• Strings and Patterns (including regular expressions)
• Web Programming
• Object-oriented Programming
• Object-oriented Design
• Database Programming
• XML and Web Services
• Security
• Streams and Network Programming
• Differences Between PHP 4 and 5

After reading the guide, I took my first practice exam and scored Excellent overall. Scores are displayed as Fail, Pass, or Excellent. The website says that the practice exams are more difficult than the real exam. If you have a good working knowledge of PHP, the exam should not be too difficult. Here are some topics that you should be familiar with:

• PHP Operators (instanceof, ===, @, etc)
• Parsing XML documents and using SOAP services
• Regular expressions
• Commonly used string functions (php.net/strings)
• Using prepared SQL statements
  
• Basic design patterns
• Classes and object oriented programming
• Array functions (php.net/ref.array)
  
• Standard PHP Library (php.net/book.spl)
• Know Array interfaces and Autoload
  

In addition to these, you should know how to write secure PHP code. If you are not aware of how to do this, please stop writing PHP code. You can download the Security chapter of the PHP 5 Study Guide for free from http://www.zceguide.com. I recommend purchasing the study guide to help study for the exam. The exam expects that you use PHP often enough to recall basic functions, but it does not expect you to memorize the entire PHP manual. You should know some of the differences between PHP 4 and PHP 5. This includes different class access levels (public, private, protected and final), interfaces, and references. Overall, I feel that the certification is a good way to help determine whether or not an employee has the skills necessary to develop solid PHP applications. You can read more about it on the Zend certification website.