Tag: zce

For some years I've been creating a bundle of links covering articles I recommend for various topics in the Zend Certified Engineer Exam (if you can here looking for the bundle itself, it's at http://beta.lornajane.net/zce-links-collection). This was done using bitly's bundles feature, which I thought was a great way to share links. In fact I had 10-15 bundles that I had created from collating all the links in a particular training course or talk, so that people didn't have to try to write down URLs as I went along. Unfortunately they sunset their bundles and then removed them completely, and I missed the announcement (it all happened quite quickly, they'd seen some abuse of the feature, it's free, all totally reasonable) BUT they also didn't respond to my support questions about how to recover the data.

It turns out, it's an undocumented feature on their API, so here is everything I know about recovering your bundle data, including the script I used to rescue my own data.

tl;dr version: the ZCE Preparation Pack is now available from Leanpub https://leanpub.com/zce costing $30.

I've been running a preparation course for the Zend Certified Engineer exam for many years now.  Once upon a time it was possible to buy a pack of sample exams and I …

There is a change in legislation for selling digital goods to anyone in the EU, and to cut a long story short this means that my ZCE Questions Pack will be unavailable at least in the short term. The pack is intended for anyone preparing for ZCE, it has general …

Yesterday I updated my previous ZCE certificate to the Zend Certified PHP Developer qualification (the new ZCE for PHP 5.5 also got a new name). Since the ZCE 5.3 exam is no longer available and I work with various clients to prepare their teams for these certifications, it …

If you're interested in becoming a Zend Certified Engineer and are local enough to make it to the next PHP North West User Group meeting on Tuesday, 5th March in Manchester (UK), then come along! I'll be giving a talk and welcoming questions and discussion around becoming ZCE, why you …

A few people have told me it's their New Year's resolution to become a ZCE this year, and I'm sure they're not the only ones. I regularly help developers and teams prepare for ZCE, so I thought I'd make up a mini package of tips, tricks and a full set sample questions with solutions and explanations, for anyone who won't be taking a whole preparation course, link below:

Edit: Pack now available from https://leanpub.com/zce

Someone will probably tell me that this is an elementary-level topic, but I got some good questions regarding joins from my most recent ZCE class students, so I thought I'd put down the examples that I used to explain this to them. Being able to join with confidence is a key skill, because it means that you can refactor and normalise your data, without worrying about how hard something will be to retrieve.

Whenever I ask a group of developers if they are familiar with regular expressions, I seem to get at least half the responses along the lines of "I've used them, but I don't like them". Call me a geek if you like, but I quite like regex; I think often it seems unfriendly because it's used inappropriately or just thrown into code with "here be dragons" type comments rather than documentation about what should match, and what shouldn't!

As with most things, it's pretty easy when you know how, so here's my one-step-at-a-time approach to regex (stolen from my ZCE preparation tutorial slides). Let's begin at the very beginning: regular expressions have delimiters, usually a slash character, and these contain a pattern that describes a string.

I help people qualify for Zend Certification and in the last few months I've had questions about both ArrayAccess and ArrayObject. This post is an attempt to illuminate both.

I regularly teach the Zend Certification course and one thing that really splits those with a Computer Science background from those without is handling number systems other than decimal. Personally I don't see it as a major omission, I certainly don't work with those systems very often in web development! However, ZCE includes decimal, binary, octal and hexadecimal numbers in its syllabus, so I always make sure to stop and teach it. Here's a quick round-up of how they work:

|image1|Recently I have been getting to grips with the ZCE since it was updated to take account of PHP 5.3. In the last few weeks I've both passed the certificate myself and also taught Zend's certification training course as a classroom course at NTI Leeds. I thought I'd share my top tips for preparing for taking the ZCE - getting to the standard, last-minute preparations, and also some tips for surviving the day itself (disclaimer: everyone sitting the ZCE signs a declaration not to disclose the contents of the exam, so I can't actually tell you the questions, sorry!)

I recently took (and passed!) the ZCE 5.3 certification. I've been a Zend Certified Engineer (5.0) for nearly 3 years, and I know a lot more about PHP today than I did then. Today I speak and write various things related to PHP, and also teach all sorts of topics including PHP certification. I thought I'd share my thoughts on the ZCE, and I'll write a follow-up post on how to prepare for it.