Yep – this morning I took and passed my first Zend Certified Engineer qualification. As with all the candidates, we are bound by a Non Disclosure Agreement, but my tip for anyone wanting to take the exam is to practise and revise more. I found the questions much trickier than I thought they were going to be (based off the PHP5 mock tests I had left), but rightfully so. Good times people!
Oh yes, by the way I know the link doesn’t work yet, but I’m informed it can take 24-48 hours for my Zend Yellow Pages entry to become live… It’s live now 
Srsly PHP, why can’t I do this:
$value = isset($myGPCWrapper->Get("value")) ? $myGPCWrapper->Get("value") : $default;Resulting in this:
Fatal error: Can’t use method return value in write context in /path/to/my/script.php on line 21
And instead I have to do this:
$foo = $myGPCWrapper->Get("value");
$value = isset($foo) ? $foo : $default;or
$value = isset($_GET['value']) ? $myGPCWrapper->Get("value") : $default;I mean… how is isset writing to my variable?!
Writing a bit of PHP tonight and found that if you use parse_ini_file to load an INI file in PHP, there is a slightly hacky way of having double quotes in strings. For example, I tried these:
somevalue = "This ""string"" has quotes"
somevalue = "This \"string\" has quotes"
But none of them worked! Turns out a quick look at the PHP manual reveals a simple (but a bit hacky) solution to this is to define a constant e.g. QUOTE to be “, and use that in the INI string.
// In the PHP:
define('QUOTE', '"');; and in the INI file
somevalue = "This "QUOTE"string"QUOTE" has quotes"
As some of you may know, back in March/April time, I started revising for my Zend PHP5 Certification, but that was pretty much put on hold when we had a baby… now I’m revising again and after having revised a couple of topics I retook the test. As you can see, I passed it “with flying colours” this time, but still have improvement to do with Streams and Design patterns…
Comparing with my last test:
- 2 categories remained the same;
- Database access
- Web features)
- 4 categories improved;
- PHP 4/5 Differences (was FAIL)
- Security (was PASS)
- String Manipulation and Regular Expressions (was PASS)
- Functions (was PASS)
- 2 categories declined;
- Streams and Network Programming (was PASS)
- Design (was EXCELLENT) [eep - not so good that!]
I think overall however, these statistics shouldn’t be examined too much – there are some questions I can guess and don’t demonstrate that I truly *know* some topics, so I’m going to cover off a few categories I don’t feel to confident on anyway – but then the practise tests are just indicators, and not meant to represent the final exam… we’ll see!
If you follow 
from Amazon as I read an excerpt from that the other day and found it to be generally quite good. Still waiting for that to arrive, but next month I’m going to be ordering the 
and some online practise tests. With any luck, that should be all I need to ace the test, and after reading 
