Since I’ve read through PHP Objects, Patterns and Principles (2nd Edition) twice, I decided to take another one of the PHP5 Certification practice exams.

The Results

Things I Failed

• Database Access

Things I passed

• XML & Web Services
• Streams and Network Programming

Thing I got an “Excellent” rating on

• String Manipulation and Regular Expressions
• Basic Language
• Functions
• PHP 4/5 differences
• OOP
• Design
• Security
• Web Features
• Arrays

Things I improved on

• Arrays
• PHP4/5 Differences
• String manipulation and regular expressions
• Functions
• Security
• OOP

Things I lost ground on

• XML & Web Services

Conclusion

The overall result was an Excellent.

Obviously, I need to read up on database access- though with things moving towards PDO I’m unsure as to how much effort I should put into non-PDO database access.

Again, I need to improve my knowledge of streams & network programming with PHP, though with a Pass, I may just need to find a project to do that uses streams & network programming as opposed to doing intense research.

XML & Web Services is the only thing I lost ground on, so that’ll be another thing to read up on.

It seems my theory regarding my previous failure on PHP4/5 Differences was correct- I’ve been working exclusively in PHP5 when creating new code, with most of the 3rd-party code I work with consisting mostly of PHP4.