A lot of people asked me lately what should they do in order to take the Zend Certified Engineer exam. First of all, study! Really, the exam it’s much harder than one might expect and covers all the possible areas of PHP development. It features questions about strings, regular expression, database connectivity (usually using PDO), streams, sockets, php.ini configuration, security, design patterns, xml parsing, SOAP and so on.
While preparing for the exam, I’ve used:
- The Zend PHP Certification Practice Test Book written by John Coggeshall and Marco Tabini (ISBN 0-9735898-8-4)
- Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide written by David Shafik and Ben Ramsey (ISBN: 0-9738621-4-9)
- the PHP manual
- ZCE practice tests
About the practice exams, don’t settle for anything less than excellent, as, in my opinion, the live test has a much higher difficulty level than the mockups. And of course, search the web to get other people’s opinions on the subject. One blog I’ve found particularly useful is this one, written by a bangalorian developer called Saidur Rahman Bijon.
Good luck!
Thanx a lot cause actually i’m very interested to build my career in web development. And i’m willing to prepare myself for ZCE test.Here i got my required info.
You’re welcome! Post back a comment after the exam with your opinions and suggestions for other candidates…
Thanks for the tips. I took the exam a few weeks ago, and I didn’t study enough. I wish I had seen this before :/ I thought it was going to be much easier than it was lol. I’ll probably take it again. My advice to all of those who are about to take it is to study as much as possible, and don’t be overconfident. Just chill out though, and treat it like any other life changing exam.
-Bob from Bond Registration