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:
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!
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J from Montana, United States on 
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Having just passed the ZCE exam myself at the start of this month, I have some small advice:
1) Don’t rely exclusively on the practice tests alone. They will not help you. I found the questions on the real exam significantly harder than those on the practice tests – despite getting Excellent ratings on 5 tests before my first attempt at the exam, I failed that first time (but I passed the second time!).
2) Read the PHP manual, write some code. Particularly related to the XML and stream filter parts, as those are some of the nastiest parts of the exam. I challenge anyone who doesn’t use them day in-day out to cope well. Also, make sure you understand the differences between PHP4 and PHP5, particularly relating to objects and pass-by-reference.
3) You will find the Study Guide probably the best overall reference. I read it from cover to cover several times over before using the PHP manual as a reference too. Trouble with the PHP manual is it’s covering all versions – the test itself is related only to PHP 5.1.
4) Oddly, even though it wasn’t mentioned in the study guide as a covered subject, I got some questions about SQLite – make sure you know something about all the database engines, but particularly PDO_MYSQL.
Good luck!