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I've made use of PHP in my projects for some time, and have made a number of useful utilities that serve specific purposes that appropriately fit the context of my business: search engine optimization. I came across information on Zend's certification for PHP 5.3 when looking for certifications available for any popular languages. I had recently decided I hoped to make a move more into the development side of things. Some certifications certainly come from more credible organizations than others.

I've made use of PHP in my projects for some time, and have made a number of useful utilities that serve specific purposes that appropriately fit the context of my business: search engine optimization. I came across information on Zend's certification for PHP 5.3 when looking for certifications available for any popular languages. I had recently decided I hoped to make a move more into the development side of things. Some certifications certainly come from more credible organizations than others.

The Zend PHP 5.3 cert appeared to me as being somewhat more credible than many because of Zend's involvement in PHP (see Wikipedia). Getting certified in PHP 5.3 was also a little bit of a lower bar to shoot for because of my pre-existing familiarity. The intent was to use getting certification as a method of setting a goal to become more familiar with the intricacies of a given language with a certain structured study approach. Receiving a neat sheet of paper with a stamp on it was just the cream on top.

I'm really glad I did this. It encouraged me to follow the topics listed in the study guide meticulously and develop my knowledge on topics I was a little less acquainted with on the inside of PHP: O.O.P., register_globals, and certain other security issues I wasn't as deeply versed on. I also took to heart much of the advice I had seen floating around the net to ensure fluency with all of the string, array, and preg functions (still string).

The exam was surprisingly difficult at points, even despite abundant studying. On some level, your brain has to turn into a compiler. My strategy was pretty old school. I made Anki memory cards for common functions, and ensured I knew the correct syntax order and what they did. Then I went through the Zend study guide and picked out all of the content I was unfamiliar with and spent a lot of time probing through it to guarantee I understood it.

The Zend PHP certification comes with some neat perks: an entry in their certified engineer yellow pages, membership of the Zend Linkedin group, and a license for Zend's eclipse-based ZendStudio IDE.

Also in existence is a number of other reasonably credible certs for programming and development: Java, Linux from Linux Professional Institute, MySQL from Oracle. The most realistic next certification to go after from my experience would be the MySQL one. After grabbing the MySQL DBA certification, the Linux one is the next on the list. The LPI certifications come in multiple levels as well.