I’m getting very close to taking the Zend Certificate Exam just need a few more things to take care of. I’ve made a list of things one should do to be in my opinion really prepared to take the exam. So here goes:

• Read the Zend PHP5 Certification Study Guide. It will get you going through all the basics ant not so basic tipsies and tricksies. It’s quite an easy read and if you are confident you can skip or eye-scan a lot of stuff.
• Read the Essential PHP Security to get a grasp of most of the web security problems.
• Read the PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra. It teaches most of the Gang Of Four patterns and a few of the so called enterprise ones. It’s one of the best books on design patterns.
• Book reading is over. The HOLY manual is your best friend now. Start with PHP array functions. Study each one of them carefuly, memorize parameters and return values.
• Next go to the PHP string functions.
• You also need to know the basics of XML, Streams, PDO, SQLite if you are going to take the exam. You don’t have to study each extension closely. I would recommend to give more attention to DOM XML, SimpleXML, XML Parser, Streams functions and PDO.
• Go and learn some regular expressions. Should take you one evening or so.
• There are also some misc extensions like SPL or functions like __halt_compiler(), error_reporting() you should know of. Though they cover a little part of the exam.
• Next you buy 5 - 10 Zend Certification Online Practicing Tests and it costs you arround $20 - $25 greengos.

And that’s basically it. Do that and not only you can take the exam but you will have deeper knowledge of the language you are using and how to use it more properly.

certificate, exam, PHP, zend