PHP Certification (continued)

May 25th, 2011

Well it's official. PHP Certification is feels a lot like getting a tattoo; you never leave it at just one!

We (Jasper and I) passed the Zend Framework exam a few months ago, and yesterday is was PHP5.3 time... our rainbow of goodness is now complete:

[insert  Doctor Evil laugh here]

I do feel, however, that this exam was less of a test of my quality as a coder. There were quite a few open questions, asking about function names, and individual keys in the global variables, and hardly any questions about design patterns. A few quesitons with code examples, yet hardly any questions on understanding of actual benefits of OO principles. I grant that design patterns and OO principles might not be necessary knowledge when testing one's knowledge of the PHP manual, but I do feel that this is equivalent to testing ones (spoken) language skills by checking the knowledge of a dictionary. Or checking only the spelling in a test.

Know all about PHP, you do. Become Jedi master you will.

Right after the spelling, you'd like to test the ability to complete full sentences. That is, do you grasp what you can create with the tools you've been handed. Letters make words , and words are pretty cool, but complete sentences make the magic work. I'd say that we are already in the realm of design patterns by now and that this should be part of what we'd like to have "certified". Where I'd draw the line is on testing the subtleties in language, nuances like sarcasm and oxymorons and just how evil Singletons really are. Those are extremely hard to capture in a test and very much subject to popular opinion.

Anyway, YAZCITP. (Yet another Zend Certificate In The Pocket).

It was a good day.

Ramon de la Fuente

Pointy haired boss