PHP Certification

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PHP Certification is the exam taken by some companies in training certification area. The PHP Certification exam was created by Zend Technologies, and is given through VUE testing centers. PHP is a programming language designed to work on web, but nowadays it is also being used for system administration on Linux.

There are over 2050 certified Zend Certified Engineers (Zend Certified Endorsed in Ontario) currently in the world between the PHP 4 and PHP 5 versions of the exams. Zend's PHP 5 examination was introduced in August 2006, and the PHP 4 exam was retired in March of 2007. Both versions are multiple choice examinations, with questions that could be filled or just answered about some technical or functional issue about PHP. The number of correct answers is kept secret from the candidate and the result showed is just pass or failed without any detail about statistics of correct or wrong answers. Zend's PHP 5 exam costs US$125 at the current time.

[edit] Topics covered in the exam

The exam is intended to provide information about how much skill a PHP professional has in order to be considered expert in his domain expertise. As PHP is used, mainly, as a web development language, the exam's focus is towards application and development in this platform. As such, the topics covered, as described in the Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide are:

PHP Basics
Functions
Arrays
Strings and patterns (regular expression included)
Web Programming
Object Oriented Programming in PHP
Database programming
Elements of Object-oriented Design (Design patterns)
XML and WebServices (use of the new DOM library is invoked)
Security
Streams and Network Programming
Differences between PHP 4 and PHP 5

Although these are the Study Guide contents, there are more to consider in order to be prepared to the exam, such as, use of the new extension PHP Data Object (PDO), as the new layer to access databases, and the Standard PHP Library (SPL), new set of classes specially created to manipulate objects as sets of arrays or files.