Finally! After months of battles with myself delaying the day out of pure laziness I took the PHP 5 Zend Certificate exam and passed it! Should be visible in the yellow pages in the following 7 days. I’m really happy I have done this and I hope this will help me in the future to prove my worth to current and future employers.

I’d love to share some details about my experiences with my readers who might one day take the exam themselves.

First of all.. It’s sad that companies such as Zend or PearsonVUE can’t store my firstname and lastname with a proper encoding. Surprising that such world famous international companies don’t use UTF8 encoding. The paper I got after taking the exam had my name written as “?ilvinas ?altys”. When I forgot my password and had to fill in my first name and last name to get a new one I had to use question marks to make it work.

Before taking the exam I’ve done about 13 mock exam tests. I also had problems to order them and had to contact Zend and wait for weeks to complete my order, the tests them selves aren’t very good. You get 70 questions and 90 minutes to answer them. Tests had lots of mistakes and sometimes rather dumb questions. For example .. Which methods are required to implement when implementing the Iterator interface. Tests give 5 choices and ask to select 5 choices. Then there are questions which you cannot answer correctly because either they are out of date or they are wrong from the start. Then there are questions that ask you questions about the PHP virtual machine implementation or PDO extension options or Sqlite performance configuration settings. Good luck knowing all that. After 10 tests you start shooting answers like darts because questions start to repeat a lot. The most frustrating thing is that it’s really hard to learn from these mock tests. They don’t tell you which questions you have answered correctly and why were you wrong. When you start doing a test you look for answers on the internet to find out what is the correct answer and it may some time to do it for any single question. Funny enough I have never got a completely excellent score from the mock exams. I always failed in at least one category and couldn’t figure out why.

About the exam itself. A heard a lot of poeple saying. “Oh it’s easy!”, “Oh it’s easier than the mock exams!”, “It’s basic level!” If you can complete that exam and you are confident that you have answered atleast 90% of the questions correctly you are a walking bible of PHP that knows the manual really well, all the possible configuration options, all the nonsense tricks in PHP and have some profesional experience. It’s not that easy. A lot of questions are hard to answer. Most of the time you can be only 80% sure. Unless of course you have a very good memory and can remember all the details. Not many developers know what PHP does with floating point array keys or how exactly PHP handles type juggling. When I was about to end the exam I was not sure I will pass it. I knew for sure that there were a lot of questions that I wasn’t 100% sure of. There are tons of questions where the exam tries to TRICK you. For example .. You have a lot of code with classes, abstractions and it asks you what does it output? And you can get confused and not notice that there is no echo statement anywhere and there’s no output. Somewhere I’ve found that noone completed the exam with perfect score and I think it was a statement by Zend itself but I’m not completely sure. You have to answer about 50 - 60% of the questions correctly to pass the test.

A few things were disappointing and could have been better but in the end I’ve achieved my goal and would like to thank Zend for making it possible. Certificates can’t tell if someone is a great developer or a nice person but they can definitely tell how much someone knows about the details of a programming language.

certificate, exam, PHP, zend