Here at Ibuildings, we encourage our developers to continue to develop themselves professionally and to gain relevant certifications. Most have the Zend PHP Certification (ZCE) and some have the Zend Framework Certification (ZFCE) and/or the MySQL Certifications. I have recently been working to gain the MySQL Certified Developer qualification which is taken as two exams; each one is an hour and a half and covering a wide range of topics relevant to developing applications with MySQL (there is a separate qualification for administrators). I found some of the course material pretty easy as I have used it repeatedly over the years but there was plenty that was fairly new to me; some features that I haven’t been using and haven't noticed other PHP developers using or talking about very much. Having learned more about them, I thought they were worth highlighting. I’ve enjoyed finding out about these features and look forward to using some of these elements such as subqueries, views and stored procedures effectively in future projects. (more...)
