Intrigued by reading about the BrainBench PHP certifiation on Tobias Schlitt’s and Markus Wolff’s respective blogs (via PlanetPHP), I thought I’d give it a try.

To basically iterate what they both said, it’s bollocks. You’ve got three minutes to answer each question and as long as you’re quick with the online manual, most of the answers can be looked up easily. That said I didn’t get them all right, so I must have missed with a couple of guesses for one’s I couldn’t lookup. One in particluar was a function supposedly for verifying credit card numbers, the logic was too much for me to take in, not in three minutes anyway.

The code examples are filthy as well, the first one I got involved two ternary operators spread over two or three lines and similar to the Zend Certification, I think syntax highlighting would be nice on these things.

I do think being able to use the manual well is valuable skill, however. I have the PHP.net Manual set up as a quick search in Firefox, so an average search is simply a case of hitting ctrl-t (new tab), alt-d (focus to address bar), php function_name, enter. I do this all day long, I’m not bad at coding, but struggle to remember parameter order etc.

Here’s my results anyway.