Zend Certification Study Guide — 5 Minute Review
My Zend PHP Certification Study Guide arrived about 10 minutes ago. This short review is based on the information I absorbed from the book in a quick flip through the pages.
The first impression of the guide is the size of the book. It is very thin, a mere 223 pages, not counting the index. There are 13 chapters, starting with Basic PHP, and then going straight into Object-Oriented PHP, and then PHP and the Web, and then on to Arrays, Strings, Files, Dates, Email, DB, Streams and Network, Security, Debugging and Performance, and finally Getting Ready for the Certification Exam.
Each chapter starts with lists of Terms you’ll need to Understand and Techniques you’ll need to master, and ends with Exam Prep Questions. Every chapter is full of code snippets to demonstrate techniques, and the syntax of functions.
The introduction explains that the guide and the exam were put together to with the intent of balancing theory and real world scenarios. The Managing Mail chapter displays this well as it not only covers regular mail sending but basic MIME, attaching files, creating HTML email and attaching images, and basic email delivery tips.
I’m was surprised to see that the 11 page database section focuses only on SQL with hardly a single line of PHP code. Seeing that PHP interfaces with so many different databases, and many of the interfaces vary slightly, it’s more logical to take the database agnostic view that they have taken. Later on in the book when referring to database queries they use the object oriented PEAR::DB like $db->query(’…’) syntax. Again, a good choice.
The coding style is too spacious for my liking, but apart from some varying tab length it’s fairly consistent throughout the guide. Format of SQL statements are sometimes inconsistent, with some SELECT FROM and other Select From, one INSERT into, but I can live with that.
You don’t need this book if you just want to use PHP. You can even try your luck, and take the test without reading the book. But an exam is an exam, there’s nothing like a good study guide to get you ready for the exam. You wouldn’t want to flunk because you don’t remember what the third argument to strpos() was would you?
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There shouldn’t be questions in the actual exam that require you to remember the third argument of strpos() or anything obscure like that. Some of those practice questions in the study guide are more difficult than the real questions.
Thanks for the information, for contributing to the guide, and for stopping by to comment.
The term ‘obscure’ really depends on your style of programming, and what you have been called on to learn. The guide does draw attention to the third argument of strpos() so I assumed that it was as likely a candidate as any other bit of information presented in the guide.
“The term obscure really depends on your style of programming”.
Although I really enjoy PHP, I have to admit that there’s a lot of “obscurity” in it. What annoys me the most is the inconsistency in built-in functions (parameter order).
I also believe that testing stuff like this is a good example of bad testing (sure hope it’s not a part of any certification (and take Shiflett’s word on it not being so)) – it doesn’t say anything about how well a person know the language (and/or learning).
Oh, and there’s also “obscurity” in PHP’s function naming (built in functions – some are named name_of_functions() others are nameoffunction() )…
Get out of your bedrooms and get a job.
Then you won’t have time to “quibble” about a name.
You will simply be glad that it exists.
If there’s anybody outthere who has got a job and does notice this sort of pettiness:-
1. Thank whatever you weren’t coding 20 years ago.
2. Whinge whinge whinge.
3. Have you ever had a professional job in programming. If not, SHUT UP
You wouldn’t want to forget the order of strpos() because it could cost u money!!!
Zend PHP Certificatin STUDY GUIDE review
昨年の9月には、こんなレビューがありました。sptops(); という関数は、与えられた文字列の中で探したい文字が最初に出てくる位置を返します。<?phpecho strpos( “hogera”, “e” );?>とやると…
Hay this is soumyadeb ghosh a php programmer from India. Don’t have much concepion about zend certification. Will please guide me with out paying money.
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