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!

While browsing the web, I’ve found this book on PHP, called Survive the deep end. I’ve thoroughly read some chapters and I can honestly say that I’m impressed. This is a very good book, one of the best books I’ve read lately. It’s not just another “copy & paste this script and it should do the trick” book. It features advanced concepts that are actually useful, it promotes best practices and you can easily see that the author is a seasoned PHP developer, willing to share his knowledge with world. The book is authored by Pádraic Brady, a developer Ireland and active contributor to the Zend Framework code base. He also maintains a blog at blog.astrumfutura.com – another good read, as he has some interesting stuff posted there.

Final recommendation: even if you’re not a Zend Framework user, you can still read it and learn more about things how to design a MVC application and apply that knowledge to your framework of choice. Survive the deep end.

I have found a site that gives away free books. And I don’t mean your avarage warez site. They claim that they have permission from the copyright holders, so I guess it’s okay download those books. Here it is: www.computer-books.us.