This post will be a bit more private and not connected to Laravel but this is the reason why there were any new post on this blog. On 31March 2017 I’ve became Zend Certified Engineer (PHP 7.1 version – 200-710) what make me really proud. A few years ago I could only dream to pass the exam and get this achievement. But now – there you go!
You can probably read many opinions of different certifications and some of them claim it’s not worth to pass them because they make you to learn some things you can normally verify in documentation. Well, this is obviously true, I’ve always thought that in many cases there is no point to remember names of some functions or order of the arguments if you can quickly verify this in documentation or use your IDE functionality to help you with this.
However when looking at my preparation to ZCE I think I might have slightly changed my mind about this. First of all, I was passing the brand new version of the exam marked as 200-710 (710 stands for PHP 7.1) and the previous version of exam was prepared for PHP 5.5. I’m using PHP 7 at the moment, but when preparing to exam I’ve learned quite a lot of features I was not aware of. I’ve studied also all changes in PHP from 5.4 to 7.1 so at the moment I can really say – I know PHP better.
Also when studying for Zend Certified Engineer exam I’ve found some interesting things/issues in PHP for example:
- whether PHP variables can start with numbers or contain specific characters
- it seems it’s possible to override trait property with different value (when loosely comparison returns true)
If anyone is interested in passing this exam, they would probably ask what I was using to prepare to exam?
Well, this was quite obvious for me:
- PHP manual
- PHP study guide (but when I was studying it there was still no version for PHP 7.1 exam, only version PHP 5.5 was available)
- PHP 7.1 compiler – I’ve spent quite a lot of time to verify different scenarios in compiler to make me better prepared for exam
In general I think it was really worth to learn and pass the exam (fortunately at 1st attempt) and I can recommend it to anyone who is PHP developer. I’m also looking forward to Laravel certification that should be available in the middle of the year.
That’s cool! Now I’m preparing for this exam too and I’m interested in how much time has it taken for you to prepare?
It’s like I spent a lots of time studying its guide, but I’m still so far from passing the certification.
Hi, I think it took me about a month to prepare to exam (so probably around 160 hours). You need to spend a lot of time looking at PHP manual and trying many things just to be confident how something works. In PHP you can find a lot of things you normally don’t use but questions about those might appear in your exam.
Hello, Can you tell me the topics to remember function and arguments. It really hard to remember all function and arguments through out the PHP. it would be better if you tell me particular areas like arrays, strings, reflection etc.
I think you should focus mainly on arrays, strings, files and XML extensions. But you should expect questions from any type of PHP functions so the more you know the better
I'm Laravel Certified Developer - Laravel developers tips
[…] post will be again a bit more private. Over a year ago I wrote about becoming Zend Certified PHP Engineer. I’m still proud of having it, but when I was passing it, I was already waiting for Laravel […]