How to prepare for Zend PHP Certification
03 Jun 2017When I wanted to get my first professional certification the answer was simple - attempt a topic that I’m most familiar with and which I want work with in the future.
Choice of certification
There are some Linux certifications, the basic ones looks easy, however what value will it give me in the future (except knowledge of course)? I don’t aim to be an administrator so maybe there is a better choice.
Maybe JavaScript? When I looked I only found w3schools JavaScript certification. But to be honest it looks like a “certification” obtained after a 4 hour course of MS Word.
What about PHP? At least I’m working with it all the time? For PHP there is only one choice - Zend Certified PHP Engineer issued by the Zend organization. So, after about 3 months of study, I was prepared. If I look at the time spent studying it was about 100 hours. That was the book plus documentation and writing sample code to check how things work. And there was additional 30 hours for making sample tests and repeating them. The exam is conducted on a computer. Most of the questions are multiple choice questions, in others you needed to write a name of a single function. There are no questions about writing whole functions etc.
Is it worth it?
Since I started to place it in my CV many employers at personal interviews have told me that they liked it. It was not about this specific certificate, but if they see a candidate has certificates they know the candidate wanted to put their free time and effort into developing their skills. If you put effort into doing something for yourself it’s thought more likely that you will put an effort into the work you do for an employer. Moreover, during the study I filled holes in my PHP knowledge and it has made me more confident about PHP.
What I liked
For the first time in my life I took an examination by Pearson VUE and discovered that it’s a great way to do it. It’s possible to be examined in almost every part of the world planning it just a week ahead. Because the minimum pass rate is about 70-80% I had to be properly prepared. I had to fill in all the small gaps in my knowledge by revising all the boring stuff about basic of language (where I knew 95%). Without a very good reason (such as certification) I wouldn’t have done it. Also, there was a good section about security features and problems in PHP that were definitely worth a read.
##What I disliked Most of the questions were just about memorizing names of functions, especially array functions. Such as the differences between array_walk() and array_map(). I’m not confident that memorizing similar functions for two XML parse engines and the way to pass an object from one engine to a second is most important in PHP programming. Put in this way, I have never had to use it in my work.
How to study
To study I used “Zend Certification Study Guide” by Davey Shafik and Ben Ramsey as well as the official PHP documentation. Sometimes I tried to code things I never used, e.g. streams or sockets servers to understand more about it. The book has about 330 pages and it took me about 100 hours to read, take notes, make sample exam questions after every chapter, and write some code examples. I recommend making quick notes (just the name of a problem, no explanation) for everything that is new or not absolutely clear. Then read the notes trying to remind yourself about what it is the next day. Then do it next week, and do it last time in a time while last preparation.
I took an additional 30 hours for making variations of the sample exam questions that I found on the internet. These were mostly from previous exam versions. But it’s worth it. It is very important to get familiar with the style of questions. I think the habit of looking for details in the questions and answers allowed me to create better answers than book study alone. The best way to answer for the question is to quick reduce the number of possible answers. Instead of trying to find the most accurate answer I recommend to find absolutely the wrong answers. Then think about each answer, see if it could possibly be a corner-case. Sometimes it changes everything.
Summary
The exam was not so bad, the questions could have been worse. The most important thing was that I had a lot of motivation to learn because of the high pass mark and the set deadline. If you don’t work with PHP since the release of version 3, have a spare 200$ and some free time in the evenings I think it’s a good idea to do it. Especially if you don’t have much experience with this type of exam.