Certified PHP developer – yet again!

Today I got certified for the Zend Certification PHP Engineer exam! My third ZCE certificate in a row!

Zend is the company behind the certification for the PHP scripting language and the Zend PHP-framework.

I am now certified for PHP version 5.5 (there was no 5.6 certification). Before that I passed the exams for PHP version 5.3 in 2013 and version 5 in 2007. And does that make me happy!

A new entry in the ZCPE Directory (formerly known as Zend Yellow Papers) has been reserved for me 🙂

By the way, I just noticed after passing the exam that the new name for the Zend Certified Engineer (ZCE) is now ZCPE: Zend Certified PHP Engineer.

You might think the exam gets easier after a few times, but man do some of these questions stink! As it is an exam for the programming language PHP, it tries to cover as many aspects of the language as possible within 70 questions. So think XML, all built-in functions, SPL and database- and filehandle stuff. See the exam topics for a full list.

Nobody is really programming from scratch anymore and writing to files and databases are usually handled by the frameworks you use. Frameworks like CakePHP, Laravel, Symfony and others. But it is a good thing to re-learn these parts again. You learn by repetition, right? And it might be time to step up my game and get involved in the core of these opensource frameworks instead of being just the end-user.

This time I got myself prepared by using:

Be sure to take enough time to prepare for the exam. A few of the questions can be really tricky: like asking a specific parameter in the correct order for a function. These are the things you normally look up at PHP.net. Or your IDE might help you out in that department.

It is said that it’s best to have two years fulltime experience as a PHP programmer before you take a shot at certification. And it’s exactly questions like these that make this a valid recommendation.

How else can I better end this post as by displaying my new, hard earned ZCPE logo 🙂

zce-php-engineer-logo

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