Tag Archives: zce

26 May
2015

Recover Bitly Bundle Data

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://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. Continue reading →

02 Feb
2015

ZCE Preparation Pack

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 used them myself when preparing for certification and also recommended them for all my students.  Unfortunately this resource became unavailable and so I created a sample exam to use with my own course …. and then (after some nagging!) made it generally available.

I’ve now relaunched the pack on a new platform (for boring regulatory reasons); its new home is on Leanpub which is a fantastic platform for authors, offering markdown authoring, github integration, and many other awesome features.  Perhaps more importantly, it also offers great features for readers: a 45-day money back guarantee and automatic updates to any book you have bought.

If you’re thinking of improving your skills by studying for ZCE or considering upgrading your certification to the current version (PHP 5.5), this pack will help you to prepare.  It includes:
– Advice on what to expect on the day
– One exam’s worth (70) of questions in the style of the ZCE
– Answers with explanations, worked examples, and resources for further study

Help yourself get ready for ZCE: https://leanpub.com/zce

16 Dec
2014

ZCE Questions Pack Unavailable

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 advice, sample questions and detailed answers and resources covering all the topics you will encounter at ZCE.

However from January the VAT rules change and I’m not in a position to comply with the new rules (they would cost a lot more than the sales make). I’m looking for alternative sales channels that would enable me to keep making the pack available but those won’t be in place immediately. If you are studying for ZCE over the Christmas break, please make sure you have the pack well in advance!

Edit: Pack temporarily unavailable now

I have other (free!) resources for you also on my ZCE page. If you have an earlier version of this pack, email me your receipt and I’ll send you a new copy – but again, you have about a week to do it!

08 Jan
2014

Zend Certified PHP Developer 5.5

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 was important to me that I keep my own certification up to date. Now I’ve done that, I’d like to share some resources for others doing the same thing.

Sample Questions Pack

One really important step in preparing for this exam is to get an idea of what kind of questions you might be asked – in terms of the format of the questions and the topics. I have a pack of 70 questions which I use when delivering ZCE preparation courses, but I also sell it separately and it is now updated for PHP 5.5

This pack is now available from https://leanpub.com/zce

As well as questions, this includes answers with detailed explanations of how those are reached and links to further reading. There is also some advice about the format of the exam and what to expect on the day itself.

Links Bundle

The PHP Manual is fabulous, but sometimes you need a more conceptual explanation. I maintain a bundle of links to blog posts or other tutorials on the various topics involved in ZCE, which you may find helpful to dip into for your own study:

http://lornajane.net/zce-links-collection

If you find any broken links, or have any resources you think should be included, just let me know. I intend for this to be a living document that we can share.

Revision Flashcards

My advice for cramming for ZCE is always the same: you need to recap all areas of the manual but focus especially on strings and arrays, because while there will be an average number of questions on these topics, it’s common to see strings and arrays used in questions that are really about function scope, or inheritance, etc.

For my own revision, I created flashcards by taking the PHP manual and making them into double-sided PDFs that I could cut up and use (you could do this with a single-sided printer, print the odd pages first and then put the paper through again – for duplex printers beware that you need to choose “short side”).

Here are the String and Array flashcards that I used for myself (they’re not perfect, but I found them useful so if you want to download them, you can. The main omission is that I stripped < and > characters which makes for interesting string comparison documentation).
Hopefully some of these resources will help you prepare for your own professional certification – good luck :)

27 Feb
2013

Talking about ZCE at PHPNW March

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 might bother, what is involved, some tips for the exam itself, and pointers to resources to help you (yes the slides will be online afterwards, check the “resources” section on my site on Wednesday ish).

The details are on the Upcoming page for the event, see you on Tuesday 5th!

01 Jan
2013

Become a ZCE in 2013

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
Continue reading →

20 Dec
2011

Inner vs Outer Joins on a Many-To-Many Relationship

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.
Continue reading →
08 Dec
2011

Simple Regular Expressions by Example

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.

pattern notes
/b[aeiou]t/ Matches “bat”, “bet”, “bit”, “bot” and “but”
Also matches “cricket bat”, “bitter lemon”

Continue reading →

27 Jan
2011

Number System Primer

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:

Continue reading →