zend php certification (1 Viewer)

[plug]

I guess this is mostly directed at egg_ and bladez

anyone sat this exam or thought about it? thoughts/comments/experiences?

I've been thinking about sitting it sometime in the next six months to a year.
mostly for my own edification; I'm sure it'll force me to sit down and learn
lots of new stuff. it also seems like a good thing to have on a cv. or is it? it
can't hurt, right?

I've sat a couple of certification exams before so I assume this exam will be
similar; full of sadistic trick questions, and the esoteric workings of lesser
known functions and such.

so, your thoughts? ta. d

 

[Bladez]

I guess this is mostly directed at egg_ and bladez

anyone sat this exam or thought about it? thoughts/comments/experiences?

I've been thinking about sitting it sometime in the next six months to a year.
mostly for my own edification; I'm sure it'll force me to sit down and learn
lots of new stuff. it also seems like a good thing to have on a cv. or is it? it
can't hurt, right?

I've sat a couple of certification exams before so I assume this exam will be
similar; full of sadistic trick questions, and the esoteric workings of lesser
known functions and such.

so, your thoughts? ta. d

I was thinking about doing it. Employers would look favorably upon it, especially if the job was a PHP development position.

But, like you say, the content of the exam is a bit off-putting. The questions are about esoteric functions in the language. Nobody bothers to learn these things as you can always pick up a reference manual.

What they should be examining is your ability to abstract or decompose a problem and how you'd represent it in the language, your application of tried and trusted design patterns etc. These kind of things are much more relevant.

 

[plug]

totally forgot about this thread!

I acquired a book of sample exam questions; it does seem
very much in the same vein as the java programmer exam:
lots of tricky, evil questions attempting to scrutinise your
intimate knowledge of various arcane elements of the
language - both useful and not so useful. a fair amount of
obscure stuff in there. as you pointed out bladez, nobody
bothers to learn a lot of this stuff because you can pull it
up in about five seconds from php.net.

having said all this, I think the question book I got is a bit
older; it seems a bit light on the oop side of things, where
the current exam spec seems a lot more meaty.
some stuff added about design patterns and the like too.

I think I'd like to do it anyway; I feel that I'm at a pretty
good standard now but I'm finding my lack of work experience
really isn't helping me. it'd be nice to have
some sort of certification to help frame the auld skills.

having said that, I do have a lot to learn. wouldn't be sitting
it anytime in the near future!

speaking of learning, and patterns too I suppose, been
getting into learning the zend framework recently. I like it.
lots and lots of documentation to get through, but I can
certainly see a lot of benefits in using it. best practice and
all that. oh, and laziness.

 

[egg_]

I bought the php4 certification book when it came out, but like ye say it seemed to focus on kinda stupid stuff like the order of arguments in strpos(), the kind of thing that your IDE will tell you in the real world

The php5 certification does look more interesting, my employer bought (or claims he bought) some training time towards me doing the exam but we're always so insanely busy I haven't had time to actually do the training. If I do I'll let ye know how it went

On the zend framework, I've been using it for a while now - must be nearly a year. There's a lot to learn, and doesn't really speed up development time at all, and your code runs slower ... but it does help you construct you code better and make it more manageable, which, as I deal with more and more legacy spaghetti-code projects, I appreciate more and more. That doesn't mean that some hotshot kid straight out of school can't fuck up your elegant architecture in the space of a single afternoon if your employer gets him in to cheaply finish off a project

 

[Bladez]

I've tried a few frameworks but mostly find them frustrating to use. I find myself working around the framework to get the behaviour I want, spending hours digging in online forums trying to figure out how to do something thats not handled in the framework documentation. Its often quicker to just go and write the code from scratch.

Web programming is really messy with all the different technologies, the stateless nature of HTTP, the client and server side interdependencies etc. I find that trying to impose order on it through patterns and frameworks is a waste of time. Its better to just embrace the chaos and get on with it.

I like this article from the creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf on frameworks. Forget the code, its more the idea he's promoting. I'd recommend a read of the comments at the bottom where he defends the approach.

http://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/38-The-no-framework-PHP-MVC-framework.html