Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Waste, February 22, 2008
One can easily argue that the certification exam itself is a waste of money, but with this book and its associated practice exams, the case is a little more cut-and-dry.
Want to pass the exam? Know the following things:
1. What can and can't go in a function/variable name.
2. What typehints are, how they work, and where they're applied.
3. What all of the array_*() functions do. The more verbose array_*_*() functions which nobody uses can be safely skipped over.
4. How to use the SimpleXML library in a very general way i.e. access elements, attributes and convert to DOM.
5. Everything about the new object model, including abstract and final classes, the new constructor format, destructors, autoloaders and access specifiers (public, private, protected).
6. How and when to pass by reference.
7. When things go out of scope.
8. What the following php.ini directives do: allow_url_fopen, register_globals, enable_dl, disable_functions.
9. What goes in the superglobals and when ($_SERVER, $_GET, $_POST, $_REQUEST, $_ARGV).
10. What all of the bitwise operators do (you should also be able to convert numbers to and from decimal, octal, hexadecimal and binary notation with nothing but your brain and a piece of scratch paper).
Database topics are covered, but you generally don't have to know any of the nonsense about mysqli or PDO--these things are all too buggy to actually use anyway, so learning about them is doubly pointless. If you can memorize function argument lists, do so with the preg_ and various string functions, because they like to throw some curveballs that use the optional args no one ever thinks about. If you can't, then don't bother because you can usually eliminate at least two of the choices they give you right off the bat and guess your way through the rest.
And please, please, please, leave comments on the questions that have misspelled words. They really need to fix that if they're going to charge $125 for a test.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good overview, but poor exam prep, October 8, 2008
I've been programming with PHP professionally for just a year. This book was a good introduction to some concepts I hadn't encountered in my day-to-day work yet, but little more. After reading this book twice, supplementing it with information from the PHP online manual, and passing their practice exams three times in a row, I still failed the exam.
This book doesn't even cover all the topics presented on their practice exams, much less the actual Zend exam. It's riddled with typos (even some in the code, which I consider unforgivable), has no practice questions or coding exercises to go with each chapter, and contains no "for more information, see..." referrals. The streams chapter, for example, primarily covers file I/O and barely touches on network and socket streams. There are some questions I still don't know where to find answers to short of scouring through the PHP manual itself in hopes of stumbling across it.
In short, a good overview of the PHP language, but pathetic exam prep.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A good review, but not in-depth by any means..., May 1, 2007
If you have already been using PHP5 on a regular basis, this book is a good source of review material but doesn't necessarily cover very much new material. It is, I suppose, a good foundation to study for the test, but it *most definitely* is not the only book that you're going to want to read before taking the Zend Certification test.
I also noticed a lot of errors in this book, so beware of that. I recommend the book by Mike Zandstra PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice in addition to this one, especially if you are moving from PHP4 to PHP5.
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