Getting Certified with MySQL

Certifications are „in“. Nowadays you can get certifications for almost every aspect of life. Admittedly, some of those certs you can just get by surviving a boring day in a classroom or more luckily for having joined a 2 week 20k yacht trip offshore hawaii that was just regularly interrupted by attending conference speaches, workshops or lessons.

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Passing the Zend Certified Engineer exam

After successfully passing the MySQL 5.0 Developer exams earlier this year the next step was preparing for the Zend Certified Engineer.

For preparation I first took php|architect’s Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide from the bookshelf and started reading. The book gives a good overview of the topics covered in the exam and I even learned a few things while reading that I did not knew of before. Unfortunately it contains too many errors and mistakes in the printed examples and there is no errata on the internet.

After reading through the book I first did not really knew how to proceed in preparing for the exam. I did not have the feeling of being prepared to pass an exam, although I would think myself of a quite good and experienced PHP programmer. A really good thing is that everyone at Mayflower has the possibility to take some text exams at Vulcan, the Zend PHP 5 Certification Simulator (also from php|architect). I passed the first test exam but afterwards I knew which topics needed more attention and some serious learning. So back to the book and the PHP manual for some days reading. After passing another test exam I felt prepared enough for the real one.

Some days ago I finally went to the local testing center with some of my colleagues and all four of us passed the real exam.