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!

Few weeks ago I was in the middle of a debate with my girlfriend – which is also a programmer – about the increment unary operator. The main topic was what will the following code display:

$i = 1;
$i = $i++;
echo $i;

I said 1, she said 2. Of course, I was right in the end. But we were having this conversation while we were heading out to meet some friends, so, inevitably, others were drawn into the debate. One of which is Costin, who posted on his blog an entry called The trials and tribulations of the C incrementer on this subject. Long story short, if you post increment a variable, this operation will take place last and its result will be poped first from the stack and in some cases will be lost (our case – read Costin’s post for more details).

Other annoying examples using the increment operator:

$i = 1;
function someFunction( $_value ) {
    echo $_value;
}
 
someFunction( $i++ ); // will display 1
someFunction( ++$i ); // will display 2
 
$j = 1;
$j = ++$j;
echo $j; // will display 2

And again, the ZCE exam features this kind of questions.

What will the following code produce?

echo '1' . print( 2 ) + 3;

Tough question? Not quite. Just run the code and find out the answer. If you’re too lazy or don’t have a PHP server at hand, I’ll tell you the result. It will print 511 to the screen. Now comes the tough question. Why is that? We – me and my colleagues at Zitec – sat quite a while before figuring it out. It goes like this (special thanks go the Alex “the badger” Novac – see his pic on Zitec’s Team page): print is a language construct. It doesn’t need brackets to work. The following lines do the same thing:

print( 5 ); // will print 5
print 5; // again, will print 5

Thus, the line print(2) + 3 will translate as print 5, because the brackets are used “arithmetically” here, stating that their content should be evaluated first. Basically it happens like this: it evaluates (2) to 2, adds 3 and prints the result. This will give us the 5 on the first position. As stated in the php manual, print always returns 1. So after displaying the first 5, the code becomes echo '1' . 1. Pretty self explanatory.

If you want to take the Zend Certified Engineer exam, expect this type of questions.

Today I have passed Zend’s PHP5 exam and I’ve joined the select group of Zend Certified Engineers. Although my programming skills today (as a ZCE) are basically the same as yesterday (as a regular PHP developer), I consider this to be quite an accomplishment. It proves that I’m a valuable professional and proves my commitment to PHP and to the open source movement.

Here’s my Zend Yellow Pages Profile.