New Page – Zend Certification Series

Searching a blog somethings is a bit annoying, so to make everyone life easier I have created a new page with the links for all posts about the Zend Certification Exam (currently PHP5 and in the future ZF).

Since is a page you can easily access it by the top menu ↑or on the right menu →

For now, a fast link: Zend Certification Series

Free Zend Certification Mock Exam

Just today I got a reply back on the Zend Forum about a free mock exam. You can check it up at http://www.abinashg.com/zend and if you are looking for more information on the overal, there is a ton of stuff in the Zend Certification forum. Give both a check. It will worth the time.

PHP Tainted Mode

PHP Tainted mode is new protection when performing MySQL queries and it still have a lot to be explained. Anyway I have posted a question on the Zend Forum a while ago, before taking my certification, and today one of the replies came with a great post about the PHP Tainted mode. Check it out: http://blog.php-security.org/archives/92-CORE-GRASP-PHP-Tainted-Mode.html.

I will be adding this blog to the resources blogs so we can still follow up with more information.

How to pass PHP5 Zend Certification Exam

I have finally passed the PHP5 Zend Exam. It was very hard work. Long time studying and understanding every core PHP function.
Anyway, here are my tips for you to pass as well:

- Study hard. Don’t think you know. Be certain that you know.
- Take the mock exams and only accept Excellent in all categories of the test, nothing less.

- Go outside the books, read forums, blogs (including this one) and off course, the PHP.net site.
- Learn the difference of echo and print and how each one work.

- Learn strings, string functions, patterns, patterns functions, streams and streams functions.

- Learn PHP.INI, not everything, mostly the new settings and session
- Learn session management and it’s security risks
- Don’t be afraid of creating scripts to better learn a new extension of PHP.
- Check the ZendCon 08 Slides. There a few there with some great info.
- Remember you must know very well all the subjects that the certification book informs
- and most important, have fun.

Cristiano Diniz da Silva
PHP5 Zend Certified Engenieer
http://mcloide.wordpress.com

Zend Exam Tips – Scoring system

If you have failed the test and have looked to the score sheet that they give you after you finish the exam and still do not understand why you have failed, here is why: Zend does not accept any score lower than Intermediate (medium) in an exam and if you got that, you have failed.

You have for the exam 12 categories, arrays, web features, xml, design, differences between PHP4 and 5, etc. All categories are marked with low, medium and high scores, or better, knowledge level. To pass the exam all you need to do is have a knowledge level of medium / high in all categories to pass.

I got this information after talking with the Zend customer support (and off course, I have asked about the confidentiality policy to know if I could disclose that) and hey, I got some good news, if you have taken the exam before, you are eligible for getting an discount to retake the exam. All you got do is sending an email to certification@zend.com.

Good luck on your next exam.

Zend Exam Tips – be careful with serialize

In the last mock exam that I did I made the same mistake twice: the “serialize” mistake. If you have read my post Zend Exam Tips III you will see that I believed that unserialize would take care of a string that seemed to be serialized. This time my mistake was over the serialize function. The question was simple:

The _______ function is used to convert an array into a string, maintaining your ability to return the string into an array.

Believe it or not, that’s not the concept of serialize function, that’s the concept of the implode function. Even knowing that I have used the implode function to perform exactly what have been described, I haven’t remembered that during the exam because “serialize” seems so obvious for being the correct question.

If you are preparing yourself to do the Zend Exam, be more than careful with the “serialize” concept.

Just to help you out, in accordance with PHP.Net, the serialize function is:

Description

string serialize ( mixed $value )

Generates a storable representation of a value

This is useful for storing or passing PHP values around without losing their type and structure.

To make the serialized string into a PHP value again, use unserialize().