Since PHP 5.3 was released last year I’ve been wandering if Zend was going to introduce a new ZCE certification for this version.

Seems like with the version PHP 6 abandoned some time back the direction was to a PHP 5.3 certification.

I don’t think the time was random considering that Zend Con, the biggest PHP conference, is near.

What’s new?

Differences between PHP 5 and PHP 5.3 are in the manual here.

Some of the most important once:

• Namespaces
• Late static binding
• Lambda Functions and Closures

Materials

The certification information is on the Zend website.

After finding that the certification for Zend Framework has a study guide completely free for registered users, I was wandering why there isn’t one for the regular PHP certification. It looks like now there is: Zend-PHP-5.3-Study-Guide-v1-3.pdf, in beta version! And is free for download!

Of course the most important material remains the manual manualul PHP, because the guide is used in conjunction with it.

It looks like the mock tests are out, as for the Zend Framework never existed anyway.

Price

The price has gone up, it isn’t 160$ anymore but 190$! The price remains a very small one anyway considering that an exam at Sun was 200$, and now at Oracle is 300$.

The already certified users receive an 20% discount until the end of the year, so if you are already certified you will pay 152$.

Best of luck!