I have used PHP in my projects for some time, and even made a number of applications that serve niche purposes that appropriately fit the context of my business: SEO or search engine optimization. I ran across Zend’s certification for PHP 5.3 when looking for certifications in any popular programming languages. I decided I wanted to make a move more into the development side of things. Credibility of certification varies from company to company, obviously.
The Zend PHP 5.3 cert struck me as being somewhat more credible than many others because of Zend’s reputation as “the PHP company” (see Wikipedia). This was undeniably a more realistic challenge to shoot for due to my already existing familiarity. My original intent was to use getting certification as a psychological leverage to become more familiar with the intricacies of a given language through a structured approach. Receiving a little piece of paper with a gold stamp on it was just just a little icing on the cake.
I am glad I did this. It induced me to follow the topics listed in the PHP 5.3 study guide meticulously and develop my knowledge on topics I was less familiar with within PHP: OOP, register_globals, and certain other security issues I SHOULD have already been familiar with. I also took to heart much of the advice I’d seen floating around the net to ensure a really good fluency with all of the string, array, and regex functions (still string).
The exam was actually challenging, despite plenty of studying. My strategy was pretty old school. I created Anki flash cards for common functions, and ensured I knew the correct syntax order and what the functions did. Then I went through the PHP 5.3 study guide and highlighted all of the content I was unfamiliar with and spent a lot of time grinding through it to make absolutely sure I actually had a grasp of it.
The PHP 5.3 certification comes with a handful of bonuses: listing in their certified engineer yellow pages, membership of their Linkedin group, and a license for Zend’s eclipse-based ZendStudio IDE.
Also in existence is a number of other reasonably credible certs for programming and development: Java, Linux from Linux Professional Institute, MySQL from Oracle. The obvious next step based on some of my experience would be to go after the MySQL one which comes in several levels. After getting the MySQL DBA certification, the Linux from LPI one is the next on the list.
Thanks for reading this article. If you’re interested in doing some more reading checkout: zend and tennessee divorce lawyer.
![[Google]]( http://www.infobizforum.com/wp-content/plugins/easy-adsenser/google-light.gif)
