ZCE Practice Test #1 – A Few Thoughts

by Sam on February 8, 2010 · 2 comments

in PHP/MySQL

I’ve been toying with the idea of taking the Zend PHP 5 Certification Exam in order to become a Zend Certified Engineer for quite some time now. For various reasons, I haven’t gotten around to being serious about it until now. I purchased a set of 5 Practice Tests and decided to do one without any preparation to determine where I am currently situated in my bid to pass the exam. Though I did pass the exam, my results were a tad bit disappointing. Take a look:

1st ZCE Practice Score

Samuel Folkes 1st ZCE Practice Test Score

Apparently, I need to brush up on a few areas. I’ve never had to use the XML features of PHP as I prefer to handle data in the JSON format and I’ve never used PDO for database access so I expected to fail in those areas. I know nothing about PHP 4 (started using PHP when it was version 5) and I’m not very familiar with the streams layer in PHP. What did come as a shock however were the failures in the arrays and string manipulation/regex sections. Those are areas I thought I was strong in. Apparently I was wrong :(

I scored excellent in the basic language, OOP and design sections, quite possibly because those are the areas of programming which interest me the most. For me, the questions ranged from simple to completely out of my league. The test itself seems quite passable once I spend a bit of time preparing. I completed the 70 questions in about 40 of the allotted 90 minutes. Of the 5 tests I purchased I decided to do them in the following order:

  • Test 1 – Unprepared
  • Test 2 – After reading the study guide cover to cover once with zero practice.
  • Test 3 – After reading the study guide cover to cover once with some hands on coding practice.
  • Test 4 – All of the above plus reading other material (PHP books etc.)
  • Test 5 – Once I feel I’m fully prepared to sit the actual exam.

I will document my progress and observations on this blog as I move forward. Wish me luck!

Continue Reading 2 comments PHP/MySQL

I’m Back!

by Sam on February 7, 2010 · 2 comments

in My Life

Merry Christmas!

Happy New Year!!! Its 2010!!! (Yes, I know I’m about 5 weeks late.)

Its been a VERY long time since I’ve updated this blog and for that I apologize to you, my readers profusely. Not only have I gotten a new job, my (very beautiful) daughter Imani-lauren Brianna Folkes was born on January 7, 2010 at 7:52pm weighting 7lbs and 2oz. Of course, the weeks leading up to and immediately after her birth were extremely hectic for me, hence my absenteeism from the blogosphere. Though hectic, it certainly has been worth every second :)

I have found (relatively) new employment at Panmedia Ltd. where I spend most of my time developing websites on top of the Drupal CMS. In addition, I do a bit of SEO and Adobe Air development. Prior to gaining employment at Panmedia I had absolutely no knowledge of the workings of Drupal; I’ve always been a WordPress buff. I will say however that my feelings about the CMS have evolved from loathe to indifference to admiration. It is difficult to not appreciate the sheer power of Drupal when one has become well acquainted with how it works.

That being said, you can look out for a lot more activity from this blog in the coming weeks. I will be writing about the usual topics as well as my experiences as a fairly new Drupal user. As usual, i’d love to hear your feedback on my articles; the comments section is always open. I look forward to hearing from you!

Continue Reading 2 comments My Life

Optimizing External CSS & JavaScript Files With PHP & mod_rewrite

November 12, 2009

The landscape of the internet has changed a great deal over the years. Websites are no longer static and lifeless, they have become dynamic and interactive. A consequence of this is that the size of modern websites has increased significantly. This poses a couple of important issues:

It takes more time for webpages to be downloaded [...]

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Web Standards Compliance (Or The Lack Thereof)

October 30, 2009

I am a stickler for standards. Whether they’re coding standards, sporting standards, laboratory standards or, more relevant to the subject of this article, web standards. Standards enable uniformity and compatibility and essentially, they make life easier. Admittedly, I am all for anything that makes life easier provided it doesn’t breach my moral code and the [...]

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PHP Concepts: The Difference Between Functions & Language Constructs

October 26, 2009

Persons new to programming often have difficulty grasping the concept of language constructs. Furthermore, both new programmers and seasoned programmers often get tripped up when it comes to telling the difference between language constructs and functions as they often resemble each other and in many instances are used in the same way. As a result, [...]

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Benchmarking Autoload Performance In PHP

October 18, 2009

I read a blog post a few days ago written by Brandon Savage outlining some of the more worthwhile optimizations one can make to their PHP code and application environment in order to improve performance. One of the optimizations suggested by Brandon is employing the use of an autoloader (for the uninitiated, you can read [...]

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The Tools You Need For PHP Development

October 16, 2009

Quite often, I am asked the question “What tools do I need for PHP development?”. Some of the askers expect to spend hundreds of dollars on development tools, others are utterly bemused when trying to select the ‘perfect’ IDE from a long list options. Still others (admittedly less frequently) come to me asking whether [...]

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Useful PHP Function: register_shutdown_function()

October 12, 2009

Since i’ve started programming in PHP i’ve found that there are some very interesting and useful functions native to the language that are buried deep in the very extensive PHP documentation. Sometimes you want to do something with your code and you end up writing lines and lines of elaborate code only to find out [...]

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WordPress Plugin GeoSmart 1.5 Released!

October 12, 2009

I have just released version 1.5 of GeoSmart. Version 1.5 has quite a few changes from the previous version which include both bug fixes and new features. The plugin code has been refactored in order to make the software run as efficiently as possible and impact the loading times of your blog’s pages as little [...]

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Of Design Patterns And ‘Patternitis’

September 2, 2009

The concept of using design patterns to solve problems in software development is by no means a new one. The Innovations of Christopher Alexander in the 1960’s and 1970’s in the area of design created a spark in the world of software engineering, particularly his 1977 book A Pattern Language. The 1994 book Design [...]

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