I was looking for ways to practice for Zend PHP5 Certification test when I came by this blog. There are some questions with answers and you can definitely measure your level with this.

Check it out: Zend Certification Self Test

Alright, more stuff was found and I have actually found another blog with some very good examples, real ones, of how the certification work and what you should expect.

Preparing for the Zend Certification

As written on php.net

allow_url_fopen

This option enables the URL-aware fopen wrappers that enable accessing URL object like files. Default wrappers are provided for the access of remote files using the ftp or http protocol, some extensions like zlib may register additional wrappers.

allow_url_include

This option allows the use of URL-aware fopen wrappers with the following functions: include(), include_once(), require(), require_once().

As a note is necessary to have allow_url_fopen set to true (On) to use allow_url_include and it is set to false (Off) or not included on the php.ini file by default.

If you run into a error like this: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration.

when you including a file to your script ( ex. a .inc file ) it’s more likely that your php.ini has the allow_rul_include not set and that is causing the error.

If you don’t have access to your server php ini file, try to rename the file to .inc.php or access the file as you would using your browser that considering that you have allow_url_fopen set to true in your server.

During the study period for the Zend Certification, I have read a lot about the MySQLi library from PHP and all Zend Certification for PHP5 is based on this library. Considering this, I have decided to take a practical look on the library and it’s really amazing what they have done with the new lib.

For making a long story short, this is what - so far - this is what I can say about the new lib.

- Good Points:
* No more need to use pear libraries or any kind of library for doing muti-queries or procedures, this new library has built in features for that.

* The library consider the connection and statements as two different objects.

* You can set the charset, user, server from the object itself.

* It gives support to Master and Slaves servers.

* It will only execute the query after it verify that the statement is correct and you have bind the statement.

* It has a lot of info available on the object that a Db Administrator can use. Information like Server info, protocol, client info, client version, host info, host version and so on.

- Annoying point

* As far as I know you have to specify the columns as vars when you are binding the statement.

The next step is creating a benchmark between this improved library and the old library to see how fast both work.

Here’s a list of things that you should know for doing the test:

• PHP INI security config (memorize pretty much everything on this file i.e. what directive disable to not allow include files)
• Streams (and I not talking about open, writing, reading and closing a text document. i.e. $data[’buf’] = mygethosts($host,$port)
• XML methods from php5 (DOM, SAX, XPATH, SIMPLEXMLOBJECT)
• Differences from PHP5 and 4
• Arrays
• Strings (include regex)
• Functions (i.e. exec on function and show the result)
• Web Services (i.e. how to get the username and password from the headers -> http_get_username() and http_get_password() )
• Design (what’s the difference between include and require or difference between echo and print)
• Patterns (Singleton, MVC…)
• Database (and forget about mysql server, has to be MySqlLi functions)
• PDO - Portable Data Object
• OOP (that’s really the only easy one, but you guys are going to find some stuff like: how to access a obj in php5 in the same way as an array)
• Security (i.e. how to avoid a cross scripting attack)

The test is 70 questions that you have 90 minutes to answer. You can go fwd and back to one question until the end of the test. If you do not answer one, it will count as incorrect.

The questions are divided on essay, multiple choice and multiple selection.