So I decided to test myself and take the Zend exam. And I was wondering if anyone here has it, and if you have any advices on what to learn or take specially care of. Any suggestions and comments are well appreciated. I take the exam on the 30th, this month. I'm excited. Thanksss.
The test is very broad but not all that difficult. I would recommend getting the study guide to get an idea of the topics that will be covered. 90% of it you use everyday but the devil is in the other 10%. Good luck! Bobby
The exam is not very difficult, it covers a range of topics so even if you are not fluent in one particular area (xml etc) you can still pass quite easily. I took and the test and attained my certification in april. One thing I hate about the zend test is that they do not release your grade, they only say whether your passed or not.
Thanks for the replies, I highly appreciate them. I have the "PHP Architect's Zend PHP 5 certification study guide", which I'll read until the exam. Besides I'll browse php.net a little bit, and I hope that's enough. Any idea of how many questions I can answer wrong?
You only need 50% to pass and they never release your final grade. You can get all of the xml questions wrong and still pass if you are good in other areas like strings, databases and OOP. My zend test also had a lot of uncommon things on it like php networking programming (sockets etc) - make sure you read up on that. (I'm glad I did ).
Only 50%?! Wow, I would have expected way more. What exactly are these XML questions you keep referring to? SimpleXML, or things like xml_parser_create() ? And thanks for the hint, I'll make sure to study sockets too!
There is several questions on simple xml (at least for me). I suggest you take the zend practice test before the real one, by memory it costs around $10.
Thanks mate, I'll do that. As soon as Zend.com works again. It's been down all day and didn't work properly yesterday either. EDIT: 2000th post.
I can't edit anymore... but got a link to the practice test thing? I can't find it anywhere on zend.com.
So I took the practice test, and passed. It's pretty much what I was scared of: Tricky questions that I don't understand. The result would have been slightly better if I knew 100% what they're asking me for. As for the rest of the results, gotta admit: I'm not too familiar with sockets, all database questions I got asked were SQLite related, which I have no idea about, security... I can't explain how I failed that. There was a (to me) unlogical question about HTML forms and security... maybe I answered this wrong. And design, I don't know too much about this either (specific names, etc) Other than that, I'm glad I passed. It said this test is harder than the real one so we should have no problem if we passed this. Either way, I'll study the things I had wrong or was unsure about and hope it's enough. Thanks for suggestions and links.
I can guarantee you that streams will be on the real test. Streams is an area that most php programmers are not familiar with as we work with databases most of the time.