Entries by Topbit

Back at the PHP London Conference at the end of February, iBuildings was offering a little test, with prize for people that could do well answering the sort of questions that are on the ZCE exam. Never one to turn down something for free, I took ten minutes to answer the eight questions. A few weeks later, I get an email from them/Zend to say I’d won the chance to take an exam – ZCE, or ZFE (Zend Framework). Although I use ZF, I don’t know it well enough to begin to pass any exam, so as I’ve still not had the chance to take it, I figured, why not take it on their dime?

About 14 months ago, I’d bought 5 tries on the PHPArch-based ‘Vulcan’ test prep exam. Today, I’ve come back to it, and gone through it again. Like last time, the test (practice and real) is scheduled to take up to 90 minutes, but I had whipped through them all in 45 minutes, I have finished the 70 questions.

I’m amused by the fact the only part of this I failed was ‘Basic Language’. The first time around it was design patterns. Either way, now I’ve got some time, I’m going to schedule the test for quite possibly later this week and see about getting the paperwork for it.

It’s also still 7 ‘EXCELLENT’s, and a fail – just in different places :-)

Overall : EXCELLENT

After my little trip out yesterday to Google Dev Day 2008 (London) at Wembley – I thought I’d post some pics I took of the day, or more precisely, of what my Elephpant got up to. You can see them on the Elephpant at GoogleDevDay08 Flickr set page.

Also, some link love to to http://www.elephpantworldtour.com/ for the idea of taking the cute little blue guy along.

Well go figure. I’ve just won $50 (Canadian, that’s about $3000 USD by now) of books and ‘stuff’ from PHP Arch, care of it’s publisher, Marco Tabini’s, blog

He’d put a little puzzle up last night, some long numbers, and a few short. I recognised them as almost ISBNs – it wasn’t hard to figure them as having dropped a zero from the front, making them “php|architect’s Guide to Programming with Zend Framework” and “php|architect’s Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide, 2nd Edition”. From there, guessing the other numbers were page, line and word counts was easy.

So, what should I buy? I’ve already got a subscription to the magazine – PDF edition (it’s so much easier to ship bits over the atlantic…).

see my previous post on the topic, #1.

My last post ended up more as a how-to than what-to. This time, I’ll say why you should have local copies of the documentation for most of the tools you use. I’ll also tell you the sort of things I always have handy as well.

Getting a local copy of php.net – and getting installed as an apache vhost and updated (probably weekly) is some effort, but well worth it. I’ve said it before, but PHP.net is the best language reference site that I’ve seen. It’s kept up to date (sometimes ahead of the code releases in fact) and while the notes that are added to it can sometimes confuse, as much as help, when they do help, they will really make the difference.

I don’t tend to buy many PHP books, because what can they do besides re-iterate what is is already there?

The most important thing to bear in mind though is not to just have the documentation there to read – you have to know what is available. Projects like PHP, the Zend Framework and PHPUnit have a lot of parts – and knowing that they have things – even if you don’t know how they work right now, can save you days or weeks of effort.

It’s for that reason that you need to at least scan over all the the docs you have – and indeed for all the libraries and tools that you use. Even I don’t read everything and expect to remember it all – but I remember enough to recognise that a paticular tool might have something to help – maybe PHP has something to search the values in an array (http://php.net/array-search), or can use Oracle, or Ldap, or Memcached, or that Zend Framework can let you easily loop over maildirs (or an mbox) to get each mail from within it. If you don’t read the manual – at least skimming over it, you would never know that functionality exists, and you inevitably end up reimplementing other people’s already debugged code. That’s a waste of your time.

So, take an hour now, and assemble a directory to put these docs into, and read through them – not everything, but at least look at headers of every section, just to get an idea of what is available and maybe go back and read up some more on things that may be useful to you. If something isn’t so interesting to you now, do bear in mind, your next project, or job, might change that.

Above all, keep learning. Never stop.

Just a quick tip here, and I’ll expand on it below the cut.

When you have a library, like PEAR or Zend Framework – or ven just the whole PHP language library – it’s absolutely vital you know what it can do.

What you don’t know can cost you weeks of effort and pain. I found this out (again) today, but it’s not my pain – it’s an employee who was too busy deciding that the Zend Framework wasn’t suitable for a simple cron-script task, he has spent most of the last few weeks duplicating something that is not as good as what I could write – with ZF – in about an hour.

As I mentioned in my second post, ZCE prep – and dumb tests – about open book tests (like Brainbench), having a copy of all the relevant documentation can be incredibly useful, if only from a speed issue. Knowing you can just open a new tab and type a few words to get the information on a function, or concept from the manual takes away so many problems.

I mentioned there that I have a local copy of the main PHP manual – and I wanted to tell you how I keep it, and a couple of other manuals up to date, as well as other documentation.