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:
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!




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