During my well earned week off work, I studied for, took and passed the Zend Certified Engineer Exam.

I was quite suprised when the words ‘Congratulations…’ appeared on the screen right after I pressed the ‘End Exam’ button, not because I thought I’d failed but because I was expecting to have to wait for the results. One guy had written that he had to wait two weeks to find out.

The exam went fine really and I felt reasonably confident.

I’d definitely recommend it to any reasonably experienced PHP developers out there. I’ve only been doing PHP about 18 months and only the last 12 or so full time.

One thing I would say about the exam, would it harm to have syntax highlighting on the example code? After coding for so long in environments like Vim and jEdit, I find it difficult to actually read code. Obviously highlighting errors would be out of the question. Another thing might be the use of better variable names within the example code, maybe using real world examples rather then $my_value.

Passing the exam has spurred me on to try the MySQL Certification ordered the books from Amazon and they arrived today. I also bought Chris Shiflett’s Essential PHP Security, once I’ve had a look at them both I’ll post thoughts and reviews.

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