Becoming Zend Certified Engineer

Question

Hi,

I have seen Zend certified engineers growing fast with upper hand over others. I am also planning to take this exam.

I just wanted to know what areas of programming should I be more focused on when preparing for this exam. Any help from zend certified engineers will be greatly appreciated.

EDIT

Also suggest good resources about this if you know any.

Thanks

Answer 1

There are questions about many kind of topics, from databases to streams, including string manipulations and basic knowledge of the HTTP protocol.

A couple of notes :

• For databases : the questions are about not using an ORM, which means you have to be familiar with PDO, mysql, mysqli, of course
• But you also have to have some basic knowledge of databse-oriented security (i.e. knowing what an SQL injection is, how to prvent them, ... )
• There are some "useless" questions about order of parameters passed to functions, and things like that
• There's a list of topics on zend's site -- if you take a look there, you'll think you need to know just everything ^^ But, actually, if you've been working with PHP every-day for a couple of years, you'll probably know most of those topics ;-)

About resources :

• I've taken a white-exam a couple of month before going to the real one, just to know the kind of questions I could have to face
• Then, I studied some sections of the PHP manual about things I quite never use in my everey-day job (like streams, for instance : the white-exam showed I was really not good with streams ^^ )
• And, in the same time, I read the study guide (it's an interesting read, but there are many mistakes in it, which is a shame considering its price and the fact it's a second edition ! )
• And something like one week before the real exam, I took another white-exam, just "for fun".

And, to finish, a couple of thoughs, both from me and some colleagues who passed the certification too :

• If you have a couple of years of experience working with PHP, it shouldn't be too hard
• Do at least one or two white-exams, in "real conditions" (no noise, no manual, no help -- but do screenshots of difficult questions, so you can check them later using the manual, or test some code)

Answer 2

I took the exam earlier this year and it was definitely worth it. After all, it's pretty affordable if you don't take the courses from Zend. It has really improved how people recognize me as a serious developer and not as some "guy who hacks dirty php scripts".

I used the "ZCE PHP 5 Study Guide" published by php-architect to get an overview of the topics and then I went through the PHP online manual mostly. I also wrote a lot of example code to try out the stuff that I had not used before.

Preparation took me about 3 months since I had to do it in my free time and you should absolutely take enough time to prepare and study. Some questions are really mean!

In my opinion a large portion of the required knowledge can not be taught by reading books. There are many questions that you can only be answered with real world experience.

The questions are pretty much about everything that a PHP developer may encounter in his work. From basic syntax and databases over object oriented design to website security, best practices and code maintainability.