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!

$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.

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.

Here’s my Zend Yellow Pages Profile.