Zend have finally posted some information about their new PHP5 certification. This new certification was planned to be released yesterday but has been postponed now until the end of August/early Sept.

There’s a fairly comprehensive list of topics - hopefully it’ll be a more worthwhile qualification than the original! No rushing the study guide this time please guys!

I just read about Bambalam PHP EXE Compiler/Embedder on phpdeveloper - very cool. Then I spotted WinBinder, genius! (I wonder how performant PHP is for GUI apps)

I bit the bullet last week and ordered a Zend Certification Voucher. This afternoon I went to book an exam; during Pearson Vue’s registration process Zend require you to enter a Zend network username (I forgot I had one). While scouring the site for my username I stumbled across this thread on their forums.

With the new PHP 5 certification going live in just 5½ weeks (26th July) I figure I’ll hold off booking my exam until this materialises. Now to Ebay my Zend Certification Study Guide!

When Zend released their certification in 2004 I promptly picked up their study guide in October 2004 (along with MySQL’s study guide). However, even now I’m still not certified, I’ve studied the material but never booked the exam. When I stumbled across this thread it reminded why I never booked the exam.

An interesting quote from Chris Shiflett (PHP security guru and member of the Zend Advisory Board) about the study guide:

However, I feel obligated to voice my concerns about the book. It was very rushed (we each had a couple of weeks to write our chapters), and the production time was nearly cut in half. As a result, the book has more errors than the average technical book. In addition, the practice questions in the back are ones that were thrown out of the real exam. This means that they were considered to be too hard, too tricky, or too useless (like memorizing the order of arguments passed to a function). I think the guide actually hurts the exam for this reason - people see those questions and begin to form an opinion about the exam itself.

This was exactly what put me off certification. I’ve lent this study guide to other (who I would consider experienced) developers at work, and they would only pass 60% of these test questions. Are they poor developers, or not bright enough? I hope not because I failed the same questions!

The problem with these questions is they’re assessing programming problems that rarely apply to "real world" programming. For this reason certification lost it’s appeal. An example:

What will the following script output?

<?php
$a = 1;
$a = $a- + 1;
echo $a;
?>

A. 2
B. 1
C. 3
D. 0
E. Null

This isn’t actually from the back of the book but the exam prep questions from the first chapter! Post your answer in the comments

For several months now I’ve thought MySQL 5’s push to a production ready status was more of a political move than technically justified. First I read this and again today when it came time to compile any MySQL support into PHP 5.1.4 on my newly installed Linux box I ran into problems.

We’re in the process of making the move to MySQL 5.0 at work too; however since we’re moving from 3.23.x there’s nothing too clever going on with the SQL. I always check up on the changes made in recent point releases. MySQL 5 scares me because of some the bugs still unpatched (SELECT DISTINCT queries sometimes returned only the last row), we’re now on more point releases for 5.0 than 4.1 (21 vs 19).