At the start of every year I like to set myself a few targets to achieve, I usually pick three professional goals and three personal goals.

This year one of my goals was to really push myself to achieve some certifications, I am doing this for a number of reasons:

1. I love learning and challenging myself
2. It looks good on the CV – which is good personal branding
3. It is good validation for the company to say that we have certified programmers

I have been really into Python recently so before I leave my PHP days behind I wanted to look into PHP certification.

So I went to the Zend site and did the practice questions that they have and I answered 3 correctly out of 9! I was horrified that I did so badly! However once I thought about it, how often to I actually use the native PHP functions? Most of the time I am using a framework or wrapper functions and have no idea how many arguments array_splice() requires.

So I bought the Php Architect’s Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide and had a read over the weekend to once again familairse myself with the syntax and breadth of functions available. I then booked myself in at the test centre at Pearson Vue and took the test. You have 90 minutes to answer 90 questions, some of the syntax questions were quite challenging, but the questions that tested application knowledge were pretty easy. After only 45 minutes I completed the test and my pass mark flashed on the screen, success!

So was it worth it? I really wanted to say that is wasn’t but I really enjoyed the process and along the way I learnt some cool things about PHP that I don’t use on a regular basis such as reflection, and exceptions (which I use all the time in Python).

If you are new to programming I think that the PHP certification is a very valuable learning curve and covers a wide range of topics that will help you become a better programmer. If you are a seasoned programmer, I don’t think the content will be of that much value to you.

For what it is worth, I am happy I took it, and even happier that I passed!

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Tags: certification, php, zend

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 28th, 2009 at 7:59 am and is filed under General.
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