Zend Certification
Posted by Sam on 05 Jul 2010 at 03:24 pm | Categories: Internets, Life, Web development, Work
I passed my Zend PHP5 Certification exam today, which has been a long time coming; work and life always managed to get in the way of studying for and, crucially, booking the exam itself.
It was certainly more broad, less fiddly/fussy than the practice tests available on the Web, and thankfully with far fewer grammatical, spelling and, most annoyingly, syntactical errors. Whilst the flaws of the exam are obvious (it often favours testing recall of function syntax, specific behaviour, obscure use cases, etc. over real-world problems and coding skill or elegance of solutions), I found it a highly positive experience to really get into some of the dark corners of the PHP manual; I feel I came away with a heightened understanding of the language in general and learnt a lot about the more advanced (and interesting) new techniques available. Especially streams…that’s a funky set of functionality right there.
Maybe I’ll apply some of the techniques I learnt to this site, but first of all it needs a new design, which shouldn’t take too long now that I’ve found myself with a lot more ‘free’ time.