I recently passed the industry exam for PHP and am now a 'Zend Certified Engineer'!
PHP is currently pretty unhip. As the bastard son of C and Perl (which is itself a mutant variant of C and shell), it has accumulated a large number of eccentricities. PHP was originally designed (like C and Perl) as a procedural language, and, like Perl, has had OO functionality unconvincingly bolted on as an afterthought. A lot of programmers of the non-Microsoft persuasion prefer Python and Ruby, which (I'm told) are a lot cleaner.
Consequently, the PHP community is trying to smarten up its act with things like certification. Unfortunately, in my experience, the results are a bit amateurish. The official study guide for the exam is badly written and riddled with errors. The official practice exams, provided by PHP mag PHP | Architect are also poorly put together, with: some questions having the choice 'all of the above' nonsensically listed as the first choice; a question that asks you to 'select five choices', when there are only five that may be selected; checkboxes used for selecting choices where there is only one correct answer; and numerous typographical errors.
The exam itself managed to get the spelling right but the structure is still severely flawed. This is because a single exam is trying to cover both basic questions about the language, and advanced questions about PHP's web service and streams functionality (areas that the PHP elders are trying to promote in a big way). As a programmer with only a couple of smallfry projects under my belt, you can be sure I have no experience with web services and streams. But the way the exam is set up, if you get enough of the easy questions correct, you really don't have to worry too much about the hard ones. This is how I passed.
Does the PHP community really need 'engineers' like me? Not if it wants credibility! A better approach would be to split the exams in two so that there is a basic exam and an advanced exam. Those who pass the basic can at least demonstrate they aren't complete chumps (which was really what I was after), while those who pass the advanced exam can be properly recognised as having attained some sort of scripting godhood. But as it stands novices and experts can pass the exam with equal ease, which undermines the value of the qualification overall.
Posted by stuart at June 30, 2007 3:42 PM