Phew. That would have been embarrassing if I’d not passed my ZCE on Thursday afternoon (Jun 4th, 2009).
Upcoming posts – keep watching
Just a quick note on what is going to be posted in the next few weeks – I’ve got a few significant pieces in mind for various topics – including: Doing the work elsewhere – asynchronous queues This is going to be a series of articles – and to support it, I’m rewriting some code
(Read More…)
I laugh at your ZCE exam prep tests #2
Back at the PHP London Conference at the end of February, iBuildings was offering a little test, with prize for people that could do well answering the sort of questions that are on the ZCE exam. Never one to turn down something useful for free, I took ten minutes to answer the eight questions. A
(Read More…)
Riddled me that
Well go figure. I’ve just won $50 (Canadian, that’s about $3000 USD by now) of books and ‘stuff’ from PHP Arch, care of its publisher, Marco Tabini’s, blog. He’d put a little puzzle up last night, some long numbers, and a few short. I recognised them as almost ISBNs – it wasn’t hard to figure
(Read More…)
Always have up to date documentation, part #2
see my previous post on the topic, #1. My last post ended up more as a how-to than what-to. This time, I’ll say why you should have local copies of the documentation for most of the tools you use. I’ll also tell you the sort of things I always have handy as well. Getting a
(Read More…)
Know thy tools first of all
When you have a library, like PEAR or Zend Framework – or even just the whole PHP language library – it’s absolutely vital you know what it can do. What you don’t know can cost you weeks of effort and pain. I found this out (again) today, but it’s not my pain – it’s an
(Read More…)
Always have up to date documentation, part #1
As I mentioned in my second post, ZCE prep – and dumb tests – about open book tests (like Brainbench), having a copy of all the relevant documentation can be incredibly useful, if only from a speed issue. Knowing you can just open a new tab and type a few words to get the information
(Read More…)
ZCE prep – practice test #1
Well, I’ve just completed the PHP Arch ‘Vulcan’ practice test – the first of up to five such practice tests I’ve purchased. I have quite deliberately not gone through what study materials I have on hand before I took this test (I wanted to get a baseline), but none the less got an ‘EXCELLENT’ final
(Read More…)
A useful idea for helping to enforce PHP code standards
Extending PHP_CodeSniffer by Raphael Stolt shows how to quite easily add to a tool that will report what parts of your PHP source needs a clean-up, from the built in ‘sniffs’ for coding standards, and now adding to that for some slightly more opinionated choices on the maximum number of lines per function, or functions
(Read More…)
ZCE prep – and dumb tests
This week I’m going to take the first of my PHPArch.com’s ZCE prep test – then I’ll read the book and see they they expect me to know. Going for the Zend Certification is something I’ve been thinking of doing for a couple of years, and especially now that it covers PHP5 – and increasingly
(Read More…)
