Zend certification - First try... ;)
Zend is sponsoring the PHP Conference Quebec 2005 and forethat they offer free Zend Certification for visitors and speakers. Since it's free, I tried passing it (mostly for fun) without any kind of preperation (neither example exam, nor the certification guide). Would be cool if that worked, although it's been quite a challange in some way.
For example I've never used the $_REQUEST array, since I always use $_GET or $_POST (and, if I might occasionally have to use cookies, which did not happen often until now, I'd use $_COOKIE). So, the questions I got regarding $_REQUEST I had to guess. Of course, I had to guess all questions on cookies in general. There's been 1 situation were I explicitly had to use cookies and that's about 2 years ago. I usually use sessions and do not allow users to do such wired stuff as "keep logged in over session timouts".
Nevertheless if I passed or not (ok, not passing would be a shame in someway, even without preperation...), it's really a good certification. There are many questions, which you cannot answer by learning from a book, but only with real programming experiences. Quite felicitous.
The only bummer is, that Daniel (the Zend guy here for administering the certification) had to let us do the exam on paper, which means that I will receive the result in about 2-4 weeks, when Daniel scanned and evaluated it. I'm really very curious on the result.
Hopefully I did not betrayal too much about the exam.
@Chris: You're a wimp, come on, just try taking the exam! ;)