Zend announced the release of the PHP 5.5 Certification exam. This brings the PHP 5.3 exam to an end of life by December 31st. I am planning on taking the exam in the next couple of months. I’ll spend these couple of months reading and studying all the new features and changes since 5.3 . Here is the list of topics listed in the Zend Certification Website:
Exam Information
- Syntax
- Operators
- Variables
- Control Structures
- Language Constructs and Functions
- Namespaces
- Extensions
- Config
- Performance/bytecode caching
- Arguments
- Variables
- References
- Returns
- Variable Scope
- Anonymous Functions, closures *
- XML Basics
- SimpleXML
- XML Extension
- Webservices Basics
- SOAP
- JSON
- DateTime
- DOMDocument
- Sessions
- Forms
- GET and POST data
- Cookies
- HTTP Headers
- HTTP Authentication
- HTTP Status Codes *
I/O
- Files
- Reading
- Writing
- File System Functions
- Streams
- Contexts
- Instantiation
- Modifiers/Inheritance
- Interfaces
- Exceptions
- Autoload
- Reflection
- Type Hinting
- Class Constants
- Late Static Binding
- Magic (_ ) Methods
- Instance Methods & Properties
- SPL
- Traits
- Configuration
- Session Security
- Cross-Site Scripting
- Cross-Site Request Forgeries
- SQL Injection
- Remote Code Injection
- Email Injection
- Filter Input
- Escape Output
- Encryption, Hashing algorithms
- File uploads
- PHP Configuration
- Password hashing API *
- Quoting
- Matching
- Extracting
- Searching
- Replacing
- Formatting
- PCRE
- NOWDOC
- Encodings
- SQL
- Joins
- Prepared Statements
- Transactions
- PDO
- Associative Arrays
- Array Iteration
- Array Functions
- SPL, Objects as arrays *
- Casting
As before i’ll probably publish posts in my blog as i walk through those topics myself. It helps me learn the subjects faster.