My advice to anyone looking to improve is to train to absolute failure when doing your push ups. That’s how I used to do it when I was 14/15 and could only manage a measily 5-10 but found that I improvements came around very quickly and my maximum number of reps improved each week.

Go and join up people and get involved!
Let me know below if you decide to step up to the challenge.

BTW I’m glad they call this exercise as a push up, calling it a press up doesn’t make sense! If you remember gorilla presses from the WWF days and shoulder presses in gym you shoulder know that’s done over your head, so there!

The things that I would recommend looking at if you’re planning to take the exam are

• The PHP manual, this is a must, any serious PHP developer shouldn’t need to be told about this bad boy. Don’t think that the exam is simply about remembering the various functions…you really need to understand the language types, operators, control structures, etc
  For me the language reference section is very important.
• I bought the Zend Certification study guide and found it to be a fairly decent aid but don’t think that alone will help you pass because it definitely won’t!
• Practice tests - I thought these were pretty good value and would definitely recommend them as a purchase. When you think you’re ready for the exam take one of this tricky buggers and you’ll probably crash and burn on a few topics, an indication that it’s time to go back to the manual.  It’s a shame they don’t tell you the answers at the end so you know what questions you messed up on.
• Other PHP developers - I found it really helpful to read about the experiences and advice from people that have already taken the Zend Certification exam…
  1. Will Fitch - http://www.phpfever.com/zce-what-to-expect.html
  2. Chris Shiflett - http://shiflett.org/blog/2004/oct/preparing-for-the-zend-certification
  3. Ben Ramsey - http://benramsey.com/archives/passing-the-zend-php-certification-exam
  4. Sidrit - http://sidyou.blogspot.com/2007/03/zend-certification-exam.htm
  5. Jure Merhar - http://www.merhar.si/php/taking-the-zend-certification-exam
  6. Alex Netkachov - http://www.alexatnet.com/node/129
  7. Josh Zerin - http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=6659647964&topic=4846
  8. Mr “I like PHP” - http://readtheweb.info/2008/01/02/passing-the-zend-php-5-certification-exam
  9. Mahmud Ahsan - http://mahmudahsan.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/now-im-zend-certified-engineer
  10. Robert Peake - http://www.robertpeake.com/index.php?/archives/102-Zend-Certified-Engineer.html

So far my career hasn’t progressed at the speed of light, but then again I didn’t expect it to. Studying for the ZCE has really strengthened my knowledge of PHP in a wide range of area, so applying all that has been learnt to future work will only improve the quality of my work, as well as my performance in interviews as I will be much more confident that I know my PHP.

A nice example of how the ZCE has affected another PHP developer’s life can be found at Richard Harrison’s website.

My question to any other Zend Certified Engineers is how has becoming a ZCE affected your career progression?

BTW…I have ONE practice exam left…I’ll donate it to the first person to send me a pic of them with a copy of their study guide, just so that I know you are really going for the exam :)  Contact me on gmail using carltondickson as the contact address or just leave a comment below.

Now for another challenge…

It’s not as flexible as Amazon’s Web Services and currently the Google App Engine only supports apps written in Python at the moment, a bit of a pain of the ass for me considering I’m a PHP developer.  The PHP community seems pretty gutted Google App Engine doesn’t have a PHP runtime but when you consider the main man of Python (Guido) works at Google and PHP isn’t allowed to be used inside the walls of Google, it makes sense Google initially decided to support Python, adding shoddy PHP runtime support just to shut up PHP developers up won’t help anyone.

If you’re a PHP developer then check out the post about lack of PHP support in google app engine by Manuel Lemos,. Manuel mentions the ways you could let Google know you are litterally dying for PHP support, and also something pretty important, don’t be a beeyatch and get into language wars saying how PHP isbetter than Python or vice versa. Surely just give Python a try and see if it’s works for you and your particular task…I know I’ll be working through the GAE (one of the most unfortunate IT-related abbreviations I can think of, know of any others?) getting started guide.

Having previously missed out on the 10 000 developer signup for the beta I’m off to grab a piece of this much hyped GAE action while I can. Watch this space for my first GAE app.

Update: Adam Charnock made a post on his blog about ongoing talks between Zend and Google about adding PHP support to GAE. He suggests Zend is release some new products in Autumn so I wouldn’t expect them to release anything GAE-related before then, but you never know!
http://porteightyeight.com/archives/201-PHP-for-Google-App-Engine-in-the-works.html

Seeing how Dustin Diaz labelled his area ‘basement’ and YUI calling there’s ’sandbox’ I felt I should come up with an original name of my own, so my basement/sandbox/playground/test area will be called the shed…what do you call yours? Expect to find some interesting tests to accompany tutorials in the future!

Loving this advert by the way, thank God i’m not at that stage of my life just yet!

My requirements for the lightbox were…

• Small file size for all included files
• As few HTTP requests as possible, i.e. for images, CSS, JS libraries
• Support for image sets
• Preferably uses a JS library I have used before (YUI, scriptaculous, mootools)
• Degrades gracefully if the user doesn’t have JS

I have found a cheeky little comparison matrix of lightbox alternatives, meaning I can stop running around the net using the various names that people have given their spinoffs of the first lightbox, check it out, it will definitely save you a lot of time!

So the first post I found when searching Google was one entitled “How do I post source code“. After seeing that they utilised syntaxhighlighter Google Code project by Alex Gorbatchev I assumed it was a built in feature…so like a fool I tried in vain to enter some test PHP code within these tags, like so but nothing worked…uuggh
[sourcecode language='php']echo ‘Why are you not working??’;[/sourcecode]

Little did I know that this was a feature included in Wordpress accounts installed at wordpress.com…as I soon found out from this test http://carltondickson.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/testing-source-code/

So anyway I found that the thing to do is install the http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-syntax-highlighter/, the installation instructions are found here. Usage is a little different to what would be done on wordpress.com. Instead of using sourcecode tags you use the pre tag which contains a name attribute and then a class attribute specifying the language of the code you are displaying.

So to display the code I have below I used the following:

<pre name="code" class="php">
echo 'Got you working now!';
echo get_include_path();
exit('Exiting script now');
</pre>

echo 'Got you working now!';
echo get_include_path();
exit('Exiting script now');

Read the usage page for more info on this quality plugin.

Oh by the way, if you get a funny margin in your code output (below) it’s probably because of your theme, I was using “WordPress Default” and was getting code output that had spaces inbetween the lines which made it look pretty poo compared to examples I had seen. A quick check in Firebug and found it was because of a margin property and some other border related style…
html > body .entry li {
margin:7px 0pt 8px 10px;
}