I have to admit, I am a bit pleased with myself. I’m usually not the bragging type, I swear.
However, if any of you follow some of my previous blog posts you might recall my mentioning that I had bought the Zend PHP 5.3 certification exam. I gave myself a relatively short timeline to study for it (~2 weeks) and take it, and for the most part just studied the PHP.net manual focusing in on what was mentioned in the study guide, as well as those blurbs I mentioned in my previous post that I’d run across (which mostly just re-iterated what was said in the free study guide on Zend’s site).
I have played around with PHP for a number of years, but not really ever sat down and focused on the fundamentals like I knew I should have, so putting a little cash on the line helped me really push myself on this.
I used a spaced repetition program called Anki, on my iphone, to memorize the syntax to a lot of the common functions in PHP. If you haven’t heard of Anki before, make sure to check it out. It seems like one of the best techniques a person could leverage to really grow fluency in any language — whether programming or otherwise, short of just constant application.
So what’s next? Hmm… I could take a shot at Zend framework (which I would need to learn from scratch), but… Instead, I have to admit I’m eying some of Oracle’s MySQL certifications with envy. Like PHP itself, I have some previous experience and can use this as an opportunity to again focus down on the fundamentals.
Also, here’s a really cool tidbit: the official MySQL certification study guide comes with a 25% off voucher for the test itself, essentially making the study guide… free!
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Hey congratulations Dan. Is there a logo you can display on that?
Cheers,
Lee
Hey Lee! Yeah, actually, I think there is. I see a few images like this one floating around on the web: http://www.theunsupported.com/images/cdba_logo.pn…